Saturday, October 1, 2011

Stanton Radio CAB

I think I just found my answer:  The Stanton Radio CAB (S-CAB for short).  Instead of talking about it, just watch this:



A complete write-up write up of how this works can be seen here:  Introducing the Stanton Radio Cab

Highlights
  • The base system price is $250 which includes the wireless throttle, receiver, and some misc plumbing.  (Battery power add in the battery+charger)
  • DCC works by sending a digital signal over the rails to a DCC receiver.  The S-CAB works by sending the same DCC digital signal wirelessly to a receiver in the train, which then passes that DCC signal onto the DCC decoder.
  • The S-CAB can be used in two ways: either to send the DCC commands wirelessly and let the train be powered by the rails -OR- to send the DCC commands wirelessly and have the train be powered via battery (what my interest is)
  • A 2nd product to allow the DCC decoder to run wirelessly is needed: a LiPo battery pack and charger
  • The battery is rather small (as seen in the video)
  • The battery can be charged via the loco's original track pickup mechanism.  This means you could not wire you're entire layout *except* say the service track or engine house which would be wired.  When the train was "parked" on that track it could charge itself.
  • Um.. it's awesome
The only downside I've been able to find so far is that 1.) you have to buy your DCC decoders from them as they do a custom wired-into-the-decoder type of solution.  This isn't too bad an option as they have the Tsunami TSU-1000 in all sound flavors.  The other downside is that 2.) it seems that you can't have like 5 of these running at once.  But then it's really only me running my trains so I'm not super concerned about that...

2 comments:

  1. Dude, this is an awesome system. I just found out about this a few days ago. Are you happy with it so far? Can you pull reasonably long trains with it and get good operating time?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I haven't used it long enough to say. The best resource right now is to join the S-CAB Yahoo Group here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-CAB/

    ReplyDelete