Hornby R8214 Elite DCC Control Unit

This Product Is very good value for your money, It is a good way to Enter The DCC world Of Model Railways. It was a speedy delivery and it was just as described. It Was well wrapped

Great addition to model railway controlling system.

suited it purpose

It does everything I require from a DCC controller.I bought this to use on my small layout that I take to exhibitions and shows as it has two control knobs making it much easier to control two locos running on the same track.Its criticised for its old fashioned display and buttons. I find the large display much easier to read without having to wear glasses, similarly for using the buttons.Its criticised for its price. The price is slightly cheaper than the Digitrax DCS52 and they both have virtually the same features.It's criticised for only being able to select 10 functions at a time. Again, this is just how the Digitrax DCS52 works.If you want more features you have to pay a lot more.

Started out on dc moved to dcc using the select unit which is great but you are constantly pushing buttons to do things so I got the select- got to say it is expensive for what it is not really a quality feeling unit but it does the job better than the select and also has loads of additional features.Beware that Amazon ships this without packing it mine arrived with address label on the box and not even the box flaps where secure.

Works with all my decoders. I have Hornby laid DCC and bachmann. Has some nice features over the select such as naming locomotives and programming settings on decoders. First thing I did was turn down the volume on my TTS decoders. As a bonus you can use the select as a walkabout controller with a cable that costs a fiver.

GOOD BASIC DCC CONTROL UNIT FOR GETTING STARTED WITH DCC. HAS A PROGRAMMING OUTPUT FOR CODING TRAINS AND AN EASY TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTION MANUAL

On value for money alone this item is a 1/5, I was in part left with little choice as no affordable controls remained available at the time of purchase and you'd expect Hornby to be a pretty safe bet for a fairly novice user of DCC. The rating would be perhaps in the region of 3 if it was about 60% of what I paid, but it's not a great unit and must be around a decade old now making the price asked for pretty poor. The display is very old hat and text entry quite limiting. Two locos can be instantly controlled simultaneously (with more than that running) but selecting further locos is not quick. The functions are split across four screens which run from non > fn1-10 > fn11-20 > fn21>30 with one button to cycle through, so if you're using sound and wanting to use a mix of functions split across those pages (especially if you're starting with something on the fn11-20 page and next command needs to be fn1-10), it's a lot of button mashing, and that's for just one of potentially 8 locos all running at once. When scrolling through the menus and pressing the rotary dial down to 'enter / ok' you can very easily find the selection you have made skips as you confirm it, so let's say you're wanting to give a loco and ID of '0008', you can knock it over to '0009' in the action of pressing confirm, and you can't abort because it starts writing to the DCC memory instantly. If you haven't spotted the slip, this can be really annoying when you're then scratching your head as to why it's not working when you have '0008' selected. This becomes more annoying in the config memory where you have to cycle through lots of features like 'dcc only' or 'dcc and dc', and the various speed curves or direction because a mistake means doing it all again. When the controller is working, it's 'OK' at best and frustrating at it's worse. Another regular issue with the rotary controller is that, let's say you turn the dial anti-clockwise quite quickly as you're performing a stop, the controller can register a surge in speed as if you've turned it clockwise leaving you scrambling for the e-stop or trying to wind the dial down as if it were DC whilst the loco surges on into the buffers or stock you were trying to couple up to. This has happened to me with both left and right hand dials. A final point is that, at the astronomical cost this controller was, it's not the kind of thing where you will buy one or more for every layout you have, so for me where I'm flitting between a few shunting microlayouts and the odd slightly larger one, I value being able to quickly plug the controller into several layouts, especially as my currently more limited amount of DCC stock is likely to be the same layout to layout. Programming can be a nightmare though. I tend to use a single road fiddle yard I have for doing the programming or more often a test loop layout I have (single track, one loco), but to flip between programming and running, you're constantly having to unplug the wires in the back of the unit and plug them into the other side. I will probably get around this eventually by, on the test track at least, having one pair of wires coming up up to an on-off-on switch that flips between inputs form the track and program outputs so that I can quickly flip between programming duties and confirming that the loco just programmed is responding and working. This does seem excessively crude in this day and age and especially at this price point. There aren't many affordable DCC controllers out there, the Hornby Select I believe will not work with all NMRA compliant decoders making it useless for anything other than Hornby decoders, but there are low-volume hobbyist manufacturers creating lower cost systems which use mobile devices to operate, giving a much simpler interface, better naming and text input, ability to name functions for any given loco and see them all on one page, and that's what Hornby ought to be targeting, and in fact, that's exactly what they are doing with their rather novel DC bluetooth controller which will cost a tenth of their DCC offering. So, all in all, pretty much nothing going for this accept that it does reliably communicate with locos, and it delivers enough power to run a few locos, but otherwise, it's really old hat and should be avoided.