Sounds like MTH is leaning towards the DCC side of things...So why not cut out all the propietory hardware and go with open source? Eliminate the middle men and go with DCC!
Hi CRH,
No, MTH is not really leaning towards DCC. Our system includes DCC mainly because DCS and TMCC don't currently offer digital inputs for occupancy and switch position detection. In the future the DCC hardware may not be necessary if MTH and/or Lionel offer detection.
There are several technological advantages to DCS over DCC. DCS has about ten times the effective bandwidth and native 2-way communications. However, the biggest challenge facing DCC right now is limited packet size for the command codes. It's the same problem Lionel tackled when they created Legacy and went to a 16bit code set. The current NMRA Standards & Conformance Department Manager is a gentleman named Didrik Voss. Di and I happen to be members of the same NMRA division and have discussed in some detail the code issues facing DCC. DCC the current options being considered range from ugly to horrendous. Lenz has been working for nearly ten years to develop 2-way communications for DCC with a system called RailCom. RailCom was finally adopted as a Recommended Practice, not a standard. However, Lenz is petitioning for changes in the DCC packet size so that they can communicate enough data to offer a loading feature similar to DCS. It may be years before they ever get acceptance from the NMRA. Another option currently on the table is called NMRA net, which replaces the current DCC codes with TCP/IP network protocol. In theory it would work great if every engine was a wi-fi enabled device. Instead, NMRA net tries to cram network protocol onto the existing modulated power signal. Ever try to use the internet with a 14.4K modem? That's about 5 times faster than DCC. Di is pretty well convinced that NMRA net is a dead end unless the price of wi-fi hardware comes down substantially and I tend to agree. RailCom is more promising, but it too exacerbates the bandwidth problems with DCC and their proposed new packet format is incompatible with existing DCC decoders.
MTH faces none of these issues with DCS. They have much more flexibility to expand their codes and adopt new features. I suspect we will be using less DCC hardware in the future rather than more. But, for now, DCC does have good detection hardware that lets us do some things we couldn't otherwise do.
