Talk:Digital Command Control

SDCC
SDCC claim to be the first and only DCC only model railway club in the world.

Do you think it merits a mention and if yes where?

- http://sheffielddcc.weebly.com/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.143.18.9 (talk) 16:46, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Open standard
Is Digital Command Control really an open standard as claimed on Trainmaster Command Control and Hornby Railways? Quoting MTH Electric Trains:
 * MTH has also traded lawsuits with Quantum Sound Industries, whose technology is used to add electronic sound to model locomotives from various manufacturers. MTH's critics also say the company patented some elements of DCC, which was supposed to be an unencumbered open standard.

&mdash; Tobias Bergemann 06:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, unless MTH starts demanding license fees from other DCC manufacturers, I'd say it's pretty free. --Agamemnon2 13:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Does anybody know when DCC was invented? --Pauldude90 08:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

> DCC was invented by Hornby, who piloted their Zero-1 system during the 50's. However, it didn't sell well, but had a wide range; this primarily consisted of lococ modules (today's equivelent of a chip), the base unit (to control up to 16 loco's, the main controller) and hand-held controllers (to give wider controllability and more operating opertunities). However, due to the prematurity of the system, several faults were foiund. Primarily, this was the track not being cleaned to a high standard. Other problems included power failiure (not enough power to the track or drop due to distance from track input) and mis-interpretation of signals (i.e. input to one loco and another moves also under the same control even when seperatly programmed). Hope this helps. MGD11 —Preceding unsigned comment added by MGD11 (talk • contribs) 10:04, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

>Hornby Zero 1 was released in the mid 70s, not 50s. It was never called DCC, as far as I know. I think that most people (by convention) reserve the DCC acronym for NMRA DCC and use "digital control" as a more generic term for all the different systems available, including NMRA DCC, Zero 1, Selectrix, Maerklin/Motorola etc. NMRA DCC is an open standard with a governing body and they do issue conformance warrants. See the NMRA DCC website for more details JohnERussell (talk) 11:12, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Lenz did most of the early work, and decided to publish their standard. Experience had shown that many incompatible command control systems meant no one system really got a chance. The NMRA became the guardian of DCC, and went to work creating and publishing a standard.99.254.14.247 (talk) 00:50, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Lenz did work for Marklin... When the NMRA set about to set a standard for command control systems, they settled on Digital pretty quickly. They asked for submissions from manufacturers and examined two submitted digital command control systems, one from Marklin. They were impressed by the Marklin product, and discussed the idea of licensing the protocol from Lenz. Lenz agreed, with the stipulation that the NMRA system could not be sold in Germany. The NMRA cannot favour one product/supplier, and didn't want any copyright or patent issues to arise later, so they created their own system based on the Lenz prototype.

It's a published fact in the October 1993 Model Railroader, which has the complete description of the proposed NMRA DCC standard. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.33.126.168 (talk) 02:25, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Article rename
I wonder if this article should be renamed to NMRA DCC? Digital command control is basically a generic term which happens to be part of the name of NMRA DCC system as well. Currently the article discusses NMRA DCC, not dcc systems in general. I think it would be justified to create a new system neutral article about digital command control technology with references to real world dcc applications such as NMRA-DCC, Selectrix, Märklin-Motorola, Fleischmann FMZ etc. &mdash;Z220info (talk) 07:10, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Do the other makers refer to their systems as a "DCC"? It's my impression that DCC implies the NMRA standard digital controllers. Who first used the name DCC? Sorry, I don't know the answers to these questions. KarlWK (talk) 19:58, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

DCC is a trademark of the NMRA, and describes the signal present on the rails. How you get it to the rails, and what you do with it after that is up to you. But you cannot call your product "DCC" if it doesn't follow the protocols in the standard. The idea is that DCC decoders from one supplier will work with any system that is DCC compliant. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.33.126.168 (talk) 02:16, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Prior to what is now called DCC, analog Command Control systems were in use (but not very common.) The digital in Digital Command Control is probably there to differentiate it from the previous analog Command Control systems.

All the old analog systems had two thing in common: no one system was the clear leader, and none were compatible with each other. By 1983 the best seller was Zero 1, and it wasn't analog. (According to Model Railroader's 1983 reader survey.) Ninety percent of the responses indicated that they didn't have a command control system of any kind.


 * Some time down the road, it is clear that the NMRA definition is now the industry standard, although there are, as ever in the computing industry, proprietary extensions used by large manufacturers as a basis for a future claim to patent rights. However, the NMRA has recently extended the DCC Protocol with a hardware bus, initially conceived as [|NMRANet], a socket structure for potential design standards. One in particular, [|OpenLCB (Layout Control Bus)], is in beta testing as the actual standard, using TCP/IP(?) communication between Arduino microprocessors as local network nodes. This is a significant extension and probably needs a master meme of which DCC should be a subset. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.250.169.160 (talk) 15:13, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

99.254.14.247 (talk) 00:44, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

DCC Z scale
The Z scale article currently states " Use of the universally popular National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) Digital Command Control (DCC) standard has expanded substantially in Z scale recently as locomotive decoders with sizes comparable to the sizes of smallest Selectrix decoders have become available " however this article doesn't currently mention Z scale. When someone has the time, could I request that this, that, or both articles are edited to address this inconsistency? Thanks in advance. GFHandel &#9836; 00:22, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

PS. I just found this page: https://sites.google.com/site/konradmalkowski/zanddcc which might help to create a sentence or two in this article. (Note that I have nothing to do with that site and have no idea how reliable its information is.) Cheers. GFHandel &#9836; 00:51, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Signal/Voltage
In the section "How DCC works", para 2, it says: "The voltage to the track is a bipolar DC signal." Shouldn't this read, "The signal to the track is a bipolar DC signal." to differentiate it from the AC power voltage ? Darkman101 (talk) 01:53, 4 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Or in plain English? All signals are bipolar, if only by reference to a neutral or earth, whereas DCC uses an apparently redundant inversion of the reference signal. Describing it as bipolar is only significant if there is an intention to use the negative side of the signal for another purpose: as it is, it simply seems to be a noise suppression method, facilitating the identification of each bit's reference null point. Your proposed revision is more than somewhat tautologous, "The signal is a signal"... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.250.169.160 (talk) 15:33, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
 * It is an AC signal, not DC.--Racklever (talk) 10:28, 11 January 2020 (UTC)
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_current: "The usual waveform of alternating current in most electric power circuits is a sine wave, whose positive half-period corresponds with positive direction of the current and vice versa. In certain applications, like guitar amplifiers, different waveforms are used, such as triangular waves or square waves." -- Dm5 (talk) 12:50, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
 * @Dm5 AC does not have to be sinusoidal, it can be square, rectangular,  trapezoidal,  etc.. The DCC signal is AC. The signal is never OFF as is stated. The information in the signal is transmitted as a series of 0's and 1's based on the pulse width. 2600:1017:A004:83B9:18D:E3A9:45A3:582F (talk) 14:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I could not agree more! I did say it is "usually sinusoidal" but "different waveforms are used, such as triangular waves or square waves". To me NMRA-DCC is frequency modulated square wave AC. Those saying AC should only be sinusoidal can look at https://meettechniek.info/additional/additive-synthesis.html and test onself: square wave AC can be constructed by summing harmonics of sinusoidal AC. Dm5 (talk) Dm5 (talk) 19:54, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Section for disadvantages needed.
This article has a section for advantages. To maintain a balanced article there should be a section listing disadvantages. I'm not pro or anti DCC but all articles should maintain a balance.