I have been in the hobby for 50 years and after a recent house move I had to rebuild my layout. I decided to take the plunge into DCC and did a lot of research. Finally went for a NCE system with Zimo decoders. I chose Zimo for a variety of reasons but an important one was their implementation of asymmetric DCC. I tested their decoder and the Lenz one before making a choice and decided that as I was not going to buy a Lenz system the Zimo implementation gave me more control over a do it yourself stop before red implementation.
I realised at the layout planning stage that block lengths have to be quite big if you are to use this feature and as I have trains five feet long this meant a block length of 5 feet plus a reasonable stopping distance and after experimentation I concluded that this needed to be at least another train length.
I have laid my track and done most of the electics and am currently playing with the CV settings to fine tune the perfromance of the system. In total I have 7 stop before red blocks. I use an IRDOT infrared detector to trip the asymmetric diodes if the signal is red. I have had quite a lot of previous experience with IRDOT's and know how to make them reliable! So far I have a couple of diesels working but have one other that is currently refusing to respond to the settings. I am about to get into fiddling with the threshold settings in CV134 to see if that solves the problem.
It is a fiddle and the large block lengths do limit the opportunities to use it but so far I am quite pleased with the results.
If there is anyone else out there using Zimo decoders I woud dearly like to exchange experiences as I have found very little written up about this feature and although the Zimo literature is quite good when you get into the finer points it is limited.
I realised at the layout planning stage that block lengths have to be quite big if you are to use this feature and as I have trains five feet long this meant a block length of 5 feet plus a reasonable stopping distance and after experimentation I concluded that this needed to be at least another train length.
I have laid my track and done most of the electics and am currently playing with the CV settings to fine tune the perfromance of the system. In total I have 7 stop before red blocks. I use an IRDOT infrared detector to trip the asymmetric diodes if the signal is red. I have had quite a lot of previous experience with IRDOT's and know how to make them reliable! So far I have a couple of diesels working but have one other that is currently refusing to respond to the settings. I am about to get into fiddling with the threshold settings in CV134 to see if that solves the problem.
It is a fiddle and the large block lengths do limit the opportunities to use it but so far I am quite pleased with the results.
If there is anyone else out there using Zimo decoders I woud dearly like to exchange experiences as I have found very little written up about this feature and although the Zimo literature is quite good when you get into the finer points it is limited.
