[Dennis David]

Normally when refering to a cab in the US that's a hand held or secondary controller.

QUOTE A device used by model railroad engineers (operators) to control motive power and accessories by sending electrical or electronic instructions to the locomotive (via the DCC command station).

 

[Dennis David]

MU of course stand for multiple unit or consist.

DCC systems offer three choices for consist control:

The Basic Consisting method is to reprogram all the locomotives in a consist to the same address and run them on one throttle. In this case all the locomotives must be headed in the same direction, head to tail, head to tail, head to tail.

Advanced Consisting stores the consist information in each decoder that supports this feature. The locomotives can be added to and deleted from the consist in any orientation head to head or tail to tail.

"Universal" Consisting stores the consist information in the command station and allows you to consist locomotives with any DCC decoder as well as an analog locomotive in any orientation.

This is a big deal in the US. I think less so in Euro.

 

[Dennis David]

Uninterruptible Signal Processing - Is this the technology that makes DCC indispensable?

 

[Dennis David]

Decoders do have a job to do depending on how those consists are created. In Basic Consisting all decoders are programmed with the same address. QUOTE Advance Consisting is a newer method and has added more flexible. It can also be the most confusing. This method uses the decoder to do all the work and the Command Station only sends out a single command for each operation. The key to Advance Consisting is CV-19. A decoder knows it is in a consist when the value in CV-19 is greater than zero. Advance consists use an address range of 1 to 127 (decimal). Some system only use 1 to 99. This is the same address range as used by 2 digit addressing. This can also cause a conflict if you have a locomotive on layout using the same 2 digit address as used by a consist. The consist address is stored in bits 0 to 6 of CV-19. Bit 7 is used for direction control of the locomotive while in the consist. Bit 7 has a "weight" of 128. If a consist address is 10 then a locomotive facing backward would have a value of (128 +10 =) 138 in CV-19. This is the way the decoder knows which direction to run when it receives a consist speed and direction command. Most systems will automatically add 128 to the address in CV-19 when a locomotive is reversed when you setup an Advanced Consist. If a locomotive is removed from a consist without changing CV-19 to 0, it will not respond to speed commands using the locomotives normal address, but the lights and sounds will work. (From Tony's Train Exchange)

BTW,

What has caused you to rethink using NCE or Digitrax? It would be interesting to see if your conclusions are valid or not.