Hey all. After picking up a few issues of Model Railroader (7 for $10! ;D) and a copy of Model Railroad Planning 2008, I have rethought how my layout is going to work. After a little thought and research, I think it would be interesting to use a combination of car cards and waybills. Car cards controlling the freight cars' pickup and set out points, and waybills controlling the movement of passenger and freight trains across the main. Now with that, It would be necessary for the operators to be able to contact the dispatcher for waybills. Now, since the layout is planned be in one room, and the dispatcher/operator lounge will be in another, radio headsets seem to be a good choice, but, I have no experience with these. So could someone please give me a few pointers, like what brand you use, why you use it, other brands that may also be good, etc. My needs are simply that it can communicate from my room (2nd floor of the house) to the layout room (basement). Which isn't very far, because if my entire room were to drop down to the basement level, my room would be right next to, if not slightly overlapping the layout room. Radio interference shouldn't be a problem, since my house doesn't have satellite tv or radio, and regular radio is very rarely used.
Please and thank you!
Look for the Motorolla hand held with the five mile range. We find using a headset is a good idea. Be careful buying headsets as the plugs are different lengths. The radio should have the intermittent channels, so you have ten steps between channel one and two, for insance. They aren't terribly expensive and normally can be bought in sets of two.
Gene
You might want to do some comparison shopping. Radio Shack does (or did) sell radio head-sets that were quite reasonable (you got a pair in a box). Granted, they might be not quite as durable as the Motorola units, but our club used them successfully for quite a few years. They don't have the 5-mile range, but unless you are dispatching from the next block over, you really don't need it.