Onboard was a forerunner to DCC.Just wondered if anyone still uses it.
I’ve still got one.
I don’t use it - I use the best DCC system there is -
NCE!
(I’m just kidding about that!!! It’s simply my personal choice! Don’t flame me!!!)
Yes. Those that bought it…
It was one of the forrunner’s of DCC. The synthasized ‘sound’ was not as good as
d SOUNDTRAXX’s.
I used Onboard for 15 years–it was great!. I am now in the process of converting everything over to NCE. I am especially impressed with DCC’s running on dirty track. With Onboard, dirty track would eventually slow a locomotive down until it quit running. Doesn’t happen with DCC- it just keeps running. Fantastic!
so how did OnBoard work? was it kind of like Dynatrol?
Onboard sent tones over the track (like a telephone), and the receivers decoded the tones and acted accordingly.
It was extremely sensitive to poor track contact, as nomac34 implied. I wound up putting Tomar sliding track contacts on my locos that were set up for Onboard.
Keller Engineering, the makers of Onboard, tried for a short time to “Fuse” their system with DCC, but they quickly disappeared from the scene.
DCC is magnitudes better than Onboard was.
Anybody want an Onboard system cheap?
Nope, but I’m still looking for a used CTC-80 command station to use as a back-up for a buddy’s layout until we can build the piece of equipment we need to make it acceptible to him to switch over to DCC…