and TAM Valley’s Dead Rail
System.
Each of these two systems
have advantages and disad-
vantages as we see it.
The Stanton System comes
with a basic handheld wire-
less DCC throttle, but it’s
pretty basic. You can’t access
all the CVs in sound decod-
ers with it, for example.
On the plus side, the Stanton
system comes with a nice
battery circuit board that
steps up the power, allowing
you to use a smaller, lower
voltage battery.
And even better, the
Stanton system has the
capability to charge the bat-
tery from the rails.
With TAM Valley’s DRS-1 sys-
tem, you add a transmitter
to your existing DCC system
and you can use your current
DCC system throttles to send
wireless DCC signals to the
DRS-1 receiver in the loco.
However, TAM’s system doesn’t have a very well-developed
charging system or voltage step-up approach. TAM recom-
mends you remove the batteries from the loco and recharge
it that way. Or if you are clever, add a recharging jack some-
where on your loco so you can “plug it in” to recharge it.
Is anyone out there experimenting with these systems? If so,
we’d like to hear from you. MRH is also doing experiments
and we hope to bring you some authoritative results in the
months ahead.
Along with that, we also have a review of the Stanton sys-
tem from Bernie Kempinski coming in the April MRH. Bernie’s
using battery power in his O scale Civil War steamers.
We got a chance to try this out at the Atlanta Convention last
summer on Bernie and Gerry Fitzgerald’s O scale Civil War
modules. Never a concern about shorts or a stuttering loco-
motive with contact problems!
So contact us if you have some experience with these systems.
We’d like to add that into the projects we’re doing to get the
best report possible on the state of wireless and battery pow-
ered DCC in the hobby.
State-of-the-art article submission
As Internet technology improves, it’s getting ever easier to
submit article to MRH. We thought it would be good to dis-
cuss the latest and easiest way to get your article to us.
First, we assume you are using some kind of word processor to
put your article together. The following are your most common
choices:
MRH staff notes - 4
