My club has a radio hand held throttles. We have been experiencing signal loss and poor multiple handheld performance. Perhaps incorporating WIFI technology would be a solution. Here is the message I sent out to my club. . .
I know that DCC manufacturers are striving more for PC/palm integration, etc. Perhaps we should be on the look out for a DCC manufacturer who is going to incorporate WIFI into their system. I have a wireless network through my house (802.11g plus a repeater) and I have no signal issues in any of the rooms or back yard.
I don’t know what system that you are using, but NCE has repeaters that can be set up all around the room if you need that many depending upon the size of the room. The antenna should be high for the repeater, so it would be best to place the repeater up near the ceiling above the layout.
What DCC system is your club using? Digitrax wireless is very good at our club layout. I have seen NCE perform quite well in large spaces with the new firmware and 1/2 wave antenna systems. I hope you are not using the ‘IR’ throttles from Digitrax - they just are not reliable over long distance.
As far as WiFi - I have seen no add-ons. But you can use old 99 Mhz phones for ‘throttles’ with the Lenz system. It sounds cumbersome, but I have operated on a layout using them and they do perform quite well!
One issue would be a secure means of addressing the throttles. You don’t want someone surfing the net in the next building to somehow hack into your DCC system or havoc could ensue.
But these problems are now being solved everyday in using 802.11b applications. I’m tangentially involved in one such community wireless network. If the NMRA could come up with a common standard for that, too. This would be very useful in that it would also standardize the interface and facilitate interchangibility of throttles. But the manufacturers might have different marketing plans…
[:-^]
Someone in the building next door is not an issue as long as you have your WEP set up. Most folks don’t even realize that this needs to be done when setting up a wireless network.
While I’m not very familiar with the CVP DCC stuff used for indoor layouts, I do use the Airwire system for my outdoor large scale equipment and haven’t noticed any problems whatsoever. I know that Al is always on top of issues where his products are concerned so my guess is that a quick phone call to him would provide you the information you require.
WiFi provides a much higher data rate than would be needed for the throttle application and would have the additional cost requirement of far more electronic logic (components, memory, etc.) on both the handheld and the base station than is necessary today.
While I am not en engineer, it seems that you would probably need a TCP/IP stack as well as an 802.11b/g MAC and PHY on both throttle and base station. This would be significant overkill (at least today) for the model railroad application.</technical digression>
I agree with what others have said, other wireless DCC systems available today seem to work well for many layout owners (including CVP). Perhaps there is an installation or other issue that the company could help you with.
For the wireless frequencies in question, water is a major attentuator. Since we typically have big bags of water moving around the layout (we call them “people”), base station antenna (and repeater, if available) placement is important. Because of the physics of radio propagation vs. frequency, 900 MHz systems may actually provide better performance than WiFi frequencies (2.4GHz) for the limited data rates that are needed for DCC throttles. NCE products (and many others) use this 900 MHz range.
What you’re asking for is quite doable, but the hardware and software you’ll need will cost far more than the traditional radio throttles. You’ll need to buy the hardware to connect your DCC sysytem to a computer, a computer, a wireless network router, and WiFi equipped PDAs plus the software. For the software, I’ve found two options. First is Loco CE from Kam Industries. Unfortunately, it does not list Easy DCC as compatible yet. The other option is using the software developed by the Java Model Railroad Interface group. The best part is the JMRI software is open source and they are not engaging in absurd patent infringment lawsuits like KAM.