DCS Microphone: How reliable is it?

Worthless in my opinion.

There's a bug in DCS that sometimes causes the remote's Mic button to not terminate the Mic effect when the button itself is released.

I've had this happen on more than one occasion with several different remotes. However, all I've ever needed to do was to push and release the Mic button once or twice. I've never had to shut down and restart anything.

You should also be aware that, while the Mic button is depressed, all of the layouts remotes will be unusable. That is, they will not be able to issue commands.

Aside from the above bug, the Mic itself works reasonably well. It's a real crowd-pleaser with small children when the "engineer" inside the loco talks to them.  

This and a whole lot more is all in "The DCS O Gauge Companion 2nd Edition", now available for purchase as an eBook or a printed book from MTH's web store site! Click on the link below to go to MTH's web page for the book!

I have several MTH PS2 engines. I find the microphone works very well as long as batteries are good and track signal as measured on the handheld is a 6 or better. I have quite a bit of fun with it. I may go weeks without using it and then use every day for a bit. Visitors enjoy it very much.  

My kids really like the microphone. It seems to stick on quite often for me but like Barry, I have always got it to turn off by just hitting the button one or two more times.