It appears that Zimo will be the first company to come out with a DCC decoder that will use the new NMRA bi-directional communication standard and have sound capabilities. It is due out this fall. Apparently you’ll be able to add your own sounds like you can with ESU’s LokSound. See page 14 of their brochure. The only negative is Zimo is probably the most expensive line of DCC products.
I’ve been holding off on getting sound decoders because I do wish to eventually take advantage of the bi-directional capabilities without buying all new decoders again. Of course since I’m still in the basement finishing stage of “layout construction”, it’s a little easier for me to be patient.
Really? Have they licked that whole “need to add an inductor” to all older decoders for it to work?
Last I heard, the NMRA had not approved Bi-D 100% as of yet. Perhaps someone out there can set me straight?
BTW, correct me if I’m wrong, but Digitrax has had “Transponding” (a form of Bi-D) for years, and I think that technology is included in their latest SoundFX decoders.
I would need to read the working papers to fully understand what the NMRA hopes to accomplish with the bi-directional DCC standard they are working on, but I’m going to assume they are taking things farther than Digitrax did with Transponding. Only time will tell what advantages this technology will offer, but at least Soundtraxx thought enough to pay Digitrax the pitence they wanted in licensing to use Transponding in the Tsunami decoders. Why more companies haven’t done this is beyond me… [?]
The bi-directional communication can be used to identify the location of decoder equiped rolling stock and locomotives just like Digitrax’s transponding, but it allows for so much more.
You will still be able to use current decoders, but a non-decoder equiped locomotive will require that a rectifier be attached to one of the motor’s leads. I’m not sure if a piece of rolling stock with track powered lighting or a resistor for earlier track occupancy detection circuits will require a rectifier. I’m sure someone here with a background in electronics could answer that question.
According to the draft version of NMRA RP-9.3.2, the decoder will transmit it’s address, actual speed or load, routing number, location, simulated fuel or water level, and temperature. All of this would be quite useful with more realistic controls.
Rather than typing everything, I’ll simply provide links:
ericboone,
If you read the Digitrax Transponding FAQ ( http://www.digitrax.com/faqtransponding.php ), you’ll see that most of what you’ve described above are within Transponding’s capabilities…and have been since 1998.
So far, I’ve yet to see what Railcom can do that Transponding can’t…but that’s just from reading the FAQ’s. Anyone got anything more concrete?
Transponding can tell you were the decoder equiped rolling stock or locomotive is located on the layout. That is probably the most useful and power feature of both systems. According to the Digitrax FAQ, it can tell the locomotive’s speed, but I haven’t seen anything as to how that is accomplished. Has it been done?
I read the Digitrax FAQ and I did not see that transponding can send the locomotive’s load, decoder temperature, routing, or simulated fuel or water level. (Transponding states it has "operations mode feedback of CV’s, so that could possibly be used to send a simulated fuel or water level, but it doesn’t appear to be programmed to do that either.)
Actually, it is all but an NMRA standard already. The old version of the standard was made obsolete because it had some backward compatibility issues and the new version of the standard is circulating for approval now.
Zimo and Lenz already have Rail-Com capable products on the market and Zimo will be the first with sound and Rail-Com. I’m not certain about Kuehn and Tams as their websites are only in German and I’ve forgotten most all of the one semester of German I was able to take in college. One semester is just not enough, especially if you never really have a chance to use it at all.
As I have played with Transpoding a bit, I’ve come to realize that Digitrax is counting on you using a thrid party controller or software for the more advanced parts of the feedback. For instance, scale speed would be calculated by a locomotive traveling between blocks by a third party system which knew the distance of the block. When the blocks “catch” the Transponding signature of the locomotive(s), the third party system only needs to log a time stamp of the event and then calculate the scale speed. This information can then be transmitted back over the Loconet buss for feedback. There are a ton of nifty things that can be done with Transponding in this way, and simulated fuel stops and water levels are just as easy to deal with as scale speed is. On a side note, the most noteworthy feature of Transponding is the ability to be able to read CV values in OPS mode on the mainline. I use this more than anything else combined and it would be a mistake for the NMRA setup to not include this ability.
The fact that Soundtraxx adopted Transponding instead of waiting for the NMRA setup is a credit to the forward thinking that has been done at Digitrax, and until I see some very notewor
Okay, I’ll preface this by restating I’m a newbie, just joined a club and haven’t even started my benchwork yet.
I’m interested in the concept of adding some sort of sound system to my layout when it’s up and running in the future. The main idea would be to add a subwoofer under the layout/table to add the “rumble” that so many of us want in diesels, but that obviously isn’t possible with such small speakers in HO locos. Actually, MRR just had a recent brief editorial on this issue. Since the subwoofer sound is non-directional (as with any stereo set-up), you tend to fuse the locos higher freq. sounds with the subwoofer’s.
My question is–in order to do this, one would need reverse information from the decoder back to the command station and/or audio system amplifier. I gather from the above discussions, currently the actual sound bytes are not bidirectional back from the decoder.
Any plans in the future to allow this? I gather, probably by some other computer programming interface that this has been done already in some format.
Transponding nor the new bi-directional NMRA standard are capable of broadcasting sounds back through the rails. (I believe that would take a huge amount of bandwidth.) Both options simply allow you to know which block your locomotive is located in.
This information would need to be sent from the DCC system to a computer that plays copies of the same sounds on the appropriate speaker located around the layout when you press the buttons on your throttle. I’m not sure if any off-the-shelf product is available to do this, so I guess some custom programming will need to be done.
Of course, if all you have is a small layout and only one sub-woofer, then it is much simpler. You don’t need the ability to assign sounds to specific speakers. You just need software tied to your DCC system that duplicates the sounds to the sub-woofer.