This show is a traditional outing for the Cascade-Z-Modelers (CZM) group, happening each year on the third weekend of July at the Pacific Heritage Museum in Ilwaco, WA. Here are some notes regarding our first event ever where we ran DCC as a group.
For this event, the DCC system used was my SPROG configuration but as the Central End Module wasn't ready to be taken to the show, only a single booster was needed to power the inside mainline. As I run at home, the outer mainline was operated as a DC set-up.
Getting the DCC set up running was a breeze with the one exception of getting WiThrottle behaving normal. After some fiddling around, and with some kind assistance from the museum folks, we were able to get it working. The issue was that my simple wireless mobile router that I've been using at home didn't work as expected in the museum ... seems that the router wouldn't allow the WiThrottle server to be advertised on the private network without the router also having a connection to the Internet. Fortunately the museum folks allowed us wireless access within the museum and after configuring my router to bridge to their network, the WiThrottle worked fine.
This issue with the mobile router would have to be resolved prior to going to a show where no access to the Internet is possible or practical. With that in mind, a member of CZM (Jerry C. to the rescue again :o) acquired an inexpensive Linksys wireless router and i was quickly able to get it working with my DCC set up at home without any need to configure the new router to have Internet access. Clearly, my mobile router isn't sophisticated enough to support the WiThrottle server in a standalone cloud so I'll only use it at home where that isn't an issue, and the Linksys router will become our new show set-up router.
Since the layout space at this show was limited in size, we only had about 2 scale miles of dual-mainline. Most of the time, I ran a couple of trains on the DCC loop and it was neat how I could stand in one place to build up trains a couple of cars at a time, alternating between the two growing consists. I used a single cell phone to manage the two throttles, any more than two gets to be too busy to stay focused. At one point, Jerry jumped in with additional locos to test run in between the others. For larger shows, we will definitely have to assign trains to individuals to operate ... hey, it is almost as if we are going to be operating like the big club layouts although I doubt we will start developing freight delivery commitments and timetables to meet!