Ken:
A lot of good points...
Our club, the Pacific Southern, has had an NCE radio throttle black out for years due to some local interference on the 916.5MHz band of the radio. So we decided to go WiFi something I've done for a while at friends layouts by being "Johnny Raspberry Pi" and adding a Pi with Steve Todd's RPi-JMRI Raspbian build to their DCC systems.
That way I can use my ESU throttles wherever I go (with added EngineDriver Android app) to run... Also a shameless plug... keep an eye on the TCS throttle coming soon... I have a bit of first hand knowledge and they are very nice to use having real buttons, good weight and feel in the hand...
For us at the club we have that basement that needs extra coverage with a couple of WiFi dead spots with shape and HVAC "bunker" blocking line of sight WiFi signal.
We went with a more industrial strength Mesh twin router home system (ASUS AC68U) standalone WiFi system. Mesh is not cheap or in a sense free given a home WiFi or the built in WiFi of a Pi. If using home systems I strongly suggest a guest network with limited access to web and in home devices.
With a couple weeks of running with them we see no issue with 8 to 10 throttles. I'm not sure what the maximum of the user count is, not listed in specs... Given that we now have WiFi enabled "light bulbs" it's going to be high I suspect.
What we do see is that while the phones do flip between routers transparently that there can be a delay with a short loss of control on the flip. Some devices are are better than others and that seems to be the newer the better. That flip is a limit with extenders/access points where you have to manually select the new connection.
There isn't a problem with the phone not being used as a throttle but it's WiFi is on and set for another network. It will not attempt to log on not having the name of out network or it's passcode entered. What resources it's using trying to I don't know.
Jim Albanowski
