Alex,
?? cost per amp for a system's booster is an interesting metric but when I did my cost comparison for the club my goal was a low total cost of the "whole" package at the time.? In our case the requirement to have spare parts as backups make Digikeijs, and if bought today, YaMoRC to be a better deal, because theses systems have a cheaper single unit command station and booster vs the Digitrax and NCE plus the extra cost of a circuit breaker.?? Also, I did not hunt around for suitable and cheaper power supplies for Digitrax/NCE/ESU gear.?? We only priced their off the shelf power supplies for their systems since we were new to DCC with no electrical engineers in our club to make the safe workable alternative choices.
? ?
?? The other reason we were drawn to Digikeijs and it applies to YaMoRC too is that we could spread the 3 amp boosters around the layout and have the power near where we needed it.? In our particular case because of the design of our layout, if we bought? big 16 amp or 8 amp booster to get low $/amp it is then offset by the extra cost of the power bus that has to be run to the far reaches of the layout from 7 circuit breakers.?? We would have at minimum 30 ft runs from each circuit breaker, not good to ensure no loss of signal or voltage drop.??? It was cheaper to run the flat 6 wire telephone cable for the loconet between 7 boosters then spend extra cash on 12 gauge power bus wire from 2 or 3 big booster....and you well know copper these days is not cheap.
? So there are plenty of other considerations when buying a system, but every customer has different requirements and a different layout and in our case I was just pointing out that in general a YaMoRC system is cost competitive for our specific requirements and circumstances.
Andris
