westbys,
Well said. If you have had 5 ghost cars on the standard supply, then I have no doubt a track could have on the order of 10-12 ghost cars with aftermarket power and proper power taps. Ghost cars consumer very little power when cruising the track.
Based on acceleration tests with four Pro-X cars coded to the same channel and held against the track (grunting under load), they consumed about 6-7 amps. The black box did not complain. (Aside: In shorting tests where I was testing the robustness of the black box, I held a keyring across the rails, the amps shot up to 10Amps before shorting. I was using the 10amp outputs of the power supply, so it must be fuse protected. My guess is that 8Amps is probably the safe maximum instantaneous current draw )
I think it would be very reasonable to run four user cars with four ghost cars. However, with that much traffic, the track would need to be very large. For modelling demos, 10-12 ghost cars is reasonable.
The black box currently supports 4 user cars. Its not possible to have more than one black box, so if someone hacks the system for more user cars, they would probably have to borrow the pace car and ghost car channels for user data. Of course carrera could release a new black box if they felt more user cars was desirable. Despite the scx system offering six, the Germans thought four was enough. At this point I agree with them.
Well said. If you have had 5 ghost cars on the standard supply, then I have no doubt a track could have on the order of 10-12 ghost cars with aftermarket power and proper power taps. Ghost cars consumer very little power when cruising the track.
Based on acceleration tests with four Pro-X cars coded to the same channel and held against the track (grunting under load), they consumed about 6-7 amps. The black box did not complain. (Aside: In shorting tests where I was testing the robustness of the black box, I held a keyring across the rails, the amps shot up to 10Amps before shorting. I was using the 10amp outputs of the power supply, so it must be fuse protected. My guess is that 8Amps is probably the safe maximum instantaneous current draw )
I think it would be very reasonable to run four user cars with four ghost cars. However, with that much traffic, the track would need to be very large. For modelling demos, 10-12 ghost cars is reasonable.
The black box currently supports 4 user cars. Its not possible to have more than one black box, so if someone hacks the system for more user cars, they would probably have to borrow the pace car and ghost car channels for user data. Of course carrera could release a new black box if they felt more user cars was desirable. Despite the scx system offering six, the Germans thought four was enough. At this point I agree with them.
