 is everybody happy I'm very sorry for the delay but we didn't have the proper equipment and we do have it now thanks to the convention people who brought it over so okay all of you are gonna be on video tape tonight we've got video as long as you get what oh scale they're gonna be passing around the video releases in a minute so any questions that you have are going to be recorded for posterity and will be posted on the internet so if you don't want to be on the internet don't don't stand up I'm saying Ireland I'm the president of Digitrax this is AJ Ireland my partner in crime and he's the person who's the brains of the outfit as far as all the technical stuff I run the administrative side and the marketing and all that part of it it's a good combination for us we've been doing it for quite a long time for 19 or 20 years and we're still married and still having a great time the Hawaiian shirts this year everybody's saying what what's up with the Hawaiian shirts why do you guys have these shirts well we moved to Florida three years ago and everybody in Florida wears Hawaiian shirts so rich stand up rich show them your lovely Hawaiian shirt rich has been demanding for three years that we should have Hawaiian shirts so when I asked everybody if they had the appropriate attire for this show everyone emailed back and said they needed a gray shirt of this size or a red shirt of that size and rich emailed back and said I need a Hawaiian shirt so rich and Marty work from Houston so they're not in the office in Panama City every day and they were scheduled for their periodic visit where they come in and we do things and prepare for shows like this so we ordered these shirts and when rich and Marty came to the first meeting everyone else in the room had on the shirt except them and we told them that since they were not Florida employees that they could not have a shirt what a big pal there was so thank you rich for making us go tropical and we'll only be wearing these tonight for you guys amusement tomorrow we'll be back in the regular grays and our serious persona but this is more of a fun event for you for you guys for our users so thank you again for coming and welcome to the Digitrax user forum ah the pins that's why you're all here we know you're here for your pens so the new pin is this just in the reason we said this just in is because the pins were actually shipped to us here because when the manufacturer built them the first time around there was something wrong so we only just got to see them today we hope you like them and we're gonna hand them out everybody feel free to take one and if your friends are jealous that they didn't get one will be given them out in the booth tomorrow as well hopefully those of you that have collected them over the years will add this to your collection and you will continue to enjoy them okay the yahoo group how many yahooers have we got here tonight lots of you I imagine yes thank you all for keeping the group going and for being so courteous to each other and thank you for not not killing the new people that come on and ask the stupid questions I think you all realize there are no stupid questions only questions so keep up the good work and hold your heads high because it's a good group and we're very proud of you guys and the things you do out there on the internet we don't monitor the group that way you're free to say whatever you want to so if you if you have complaints and you want to talk badly about us that's okay not really dealers how many dealers have we got here 1 2 there's I think there were some other people that were dealers that were here support your local dealer we support your local dealers we do not sell direct to you guys because we think that dealers can do a better job of that they're on the ground with you every day and they are the people who can help you as your first line of questions when something doesn't go quite the way you expect go to the digital tracks website and they're all listed by state and you should be able to find somebody that can help you if you can't find a dealer on the website you can call into the office and we will help direct you to a dealer that can be helpful to you many of the dealers now have PR 3's in the shops so that they can download sound and some of the updates to the throttles and things that are coming out now those things are all available on our website but a lot of people don't have PR 3's that they own personally a lot of clubs on them and as a Christmas gift we gave a lot of our dealers PR 3's so they can have them in the stores to help you guys if you need to get downloads done yeah we moved three years ago why do I keep bringing this up because people keep calling the old phone number and sending things to the old address August 1st we will disconnect the old phone numbers in Norcross so up until now those phone numbers those phone calls have been forwarded to us by remote call forwarding but they've gone down to a pretty low point so we're going to go ahead after three years and disconnect those numbers so if you call us and you get a message saying this number has been disconnected please go to the website look up the new phone number and call us in Florida where we are now and where we will remain okay in Florida somebody was asking me this just a minute ago and my city Florida right there we are on the central time zone we get get calls like this all the time why are you why are you closed for lunch later in the day well because we're an hour different from the East Coast it's mostly East Coast callers that have that that question the people from California are happy about that because we're open later than most of the East Coast companies that you might be dealing with so Panama City Florida right there the next tropical depression right there is headed our way yeah I was looking at the I think it's TD2 is what it's been designated and this morning it was at a 10% chance of becoming a hurricane within 48 hours this afternoon it's up to 40% so but the good news is the track is taking it that way so we'll get rained on that's alright we need the rain we're having a terrible drought there this is the facility that we moved into three years ago there's a little house out in the front that house was on the property when we bought it several years ago and we tore down everything that was around it to build the building in the back let's see buddy would you stand up this is buddy he's from Panama City one of the few model railroaders there they're he goes by he goes by every day and buddy called our office in Norcross one day and he said I want to talk to the person who is building that building on Transmitted Road in Panama City that would have been fine except that our employees didn't know we were moving yet thanks buddy of making the announcement to the employees and yeah you wouldn't want to heard what came out of my mouth that day but since then buddy's become a very good friend the railroad club is Alden's tracks of course and he's built the most amazing helix you need to ask him about it these are some more scenes from the property we've got palm trees out front we're really into the tropical thing this is a smoking shelter that we built for some of our smokers and the ladies use this one they call it the henhouse the guys smoke under the carport out front in the little house but they just do this is the outdoor conference room where we have we have break we have break two times a day of course in lunch and this is a nice place to sit outside and talk and plan for things to come we get a lot of work done out here believe it or not this is the inside of the facility this is the surface mount robot line all along there and everything in here is parts storage and then there are cubicles back here for the employees that are doing the hand work that goes into the products that we made for you these are some of our smiling faces that that work at digitrax I didn't have a chance to take pictures of everybody but these are some of the some of the people here are some more of the people here's this is the head surface mount operator and pictures of the surface mount machines this is the wave machine where we solder the backs of the boards this is our forklift it does lots of good work for us this is Dave our tech support guy Dave where are you Dave oh Dave stand up Dave this is the person that you usually talk to stand up Dave they want to see you this is this is the tech support guy this is the other tech support guy their shirts that they actually have shirts that say thing one and think to so ask them about that administration this is another another one of our departments and before we go to AJ's office we also have a graphics department where thing three works so this is Scott he's our graphics person our designer stand-up Scott they want to see you Scott's doing some very important work for us right now but we're gonna get to that in just a minute in in addition I didn't take pictures of our sales staff that's Marty stand up Marty you're not gonna get away and he's working all those people that you saw in the pictures they're not here but believe me they have cell phones and they have computers they're fully connected they're connected and the ladies in the office are very good at backing them up when they're out of the office they check their email for them enter in or all the orders from the dealers so that we don't fall behind but they are here so that you guys can meet them and ask them questions and you know just get to see the faces of digitrics we've got 24 employees at the moment so this is just a small part of everybody that's actually on staff this is AJ's office yeah it looks pretty messy actually this was taken no no no this was taken like two years ago I couldn't get in there to take another picture you can't even get in the door now it's bad for those of you that don't know AJ has a reputation for being a sort of a messy person but he's pretty smart so we can let him do that okay so what's happening in Panama City this is the part where we talk about what happened in the past year as far as equipment acquisitions and what we have what we have done to improve the plant and equipment for the business we had new in-house test facilities for CE sunning well this includes RF immunity test equipment this is for doing the radio products that we're doing now and the new radio products that we will be doing in the future it was a rather expensive lab to install but it's going to allow us to do things faster and better not only for CE but also for FCC for the United States for the Japanese market and also for Australia New Zealand South South Africa everywhere all over all over the world and we've also installed a new video studio with a professional quality video camera it's a a quiet room with padding on the walls Scott works there with the padded walls Dave goes in there with him and they film things and pretty soon you're going to see some videos coming from us we've just gotten started with this project but we do have the equipment in place and we think that's going to be a big help to all of you who always say that the manuals are too hard to read so now under renovation digit tracks dot com look for some really exciting changes coming soon we're completely redoing the website the old one is still up right now but we are within a month or two of launching the new site so one day you're going to go on there you're going to pop up and you're going to see something that's totally new and improved something like this it's a totally new format we are redoing the tech support depot to make it more friendly we're getting things linked up a little better trying to tear out some of the dead wood that has accumulated over the many years that the current site has been in place so once the new site goes live we're counting on all of you to send in your comments and suggestions because we know that with as much information as we have on this site we're going to miss something so we're going to need you to help us get the new site filled in and make it useful to you guys what else do we do this year duplex for the European Union and Japan now the EU has already started selling the duplex and Japan will start selling it within the next three weeks it's already been shipped to them and they're writing the manuals they have a challenge with converting from English to Japanese it's not as easy as in Europe where they can use the English manuals and most people can at least get by so these are the new European products and Japanese products but these are the European versions I didn't put the Japanese ones up but this will let everybody around the world be able to use the duplex radio and Ted is now going to say you're welcome I wish we could have provided it sooner for that for the English people yes they don't they speak a different version of English than Americans and Canadians too by the way we're separated by a common language you know there's a book about that okay what have we got next oh what's coming at this show surround tracks from soundtracks how many of you have seen the demonstrations of the surround tracks product at a previous show okay well they're selling it at this show they they started selling it at the in-scale national convention a few weeks ago we were there and they sold several sets and it sounds pretty good it's it's pretty exciting and the reason we're excited about it is all those many years ago when we started putting transponding and everything everybody said what is this for why do we need this well surround tracks that's why you need it so we're gonna do a transponding refresher to remind everybody what transponding is what it does and how you can use it to implement the surround tracks technology if you choose to do so and AJ is gonna do do this because you'll probably have some really technical questions and he's the person who developed it so he will be the best one to answer questions the way I don't know if any of you went to the surround tracks clinic yet I know they gave one here they put speakers around underneath the layout and they use transponding to detect where a specific train is moving around the layout and transponding lets them do that detection so transponding underlies everything related to surround tracks so we're gonna have to switch presentations here to the other presentation please okay we've been told that we can't move around because of the taping so I'm gonna have to switch places with AJ now okay what's next I don't know how to do this I'm a girl you know that's not gonna give me anywhere is it okay so transponding it's an area detection technology and it gives you feedback into your locomotive system the transponders are installed in your locomotives or rolling stock anything with pickups from the track and those transponders create small current pulses that are picked up by the transponder detectors that you install around the layout how am I doing so far all current production digit tracks decoders are transponder equipped already so if you've got a decoder that was installed in your locomotive in the last say ten years it's probably already got transponding in the locomotive too bad you've got a challenger and you never installed it but that was 20 years ago we're talking about ten years ago you Kiwis need to get over to America more often he told me he had it he had bought one of the first systems we ever sold and it didn't work because he never installed it it won't work unless you install it sorry and we can't install it for you because we'd have to go to a lot of places and we like Florida and decoders made by other manufacturers and earlier model districts decoders do not have transponding it was a technology that we developed as I said about ten years ago so anything before that's not going to have transponders in it now you can resolve that problem by installing a transponder in addition to the decoder that's in the locomotive that would be a TL1 or a TF4 or the current transponders those can be added those also will add additional functions for additional lighting if you would like to have that you can also add transponders to any rolling stock that you want to add it to as long as it has pickups from the track now the transponder detectors are better installed on the layout detect the pulses from the transponders and they feed it back into the local net system and into the surround track system so you will know where the locomotive with the transponder installed is on the layout and that lets the surround tracks filter that information and figure out which speaker under layout to put the sound out of so that you can hear it what you need is a medial 16 series block detector to host two RX4 quad transponder detectors and with this configuration you can run eight transponding zones the surround track system can support six transponding zones six locomotives on the layout so you'll have some extra transponding zones that you can do other things with so when when the transponder equipped locomotive runs around the layout you can do a lot of different things with that feedback you can have it display on a panel that you have mounted on the front of your layout you can have it display on your computer screen which is what most people are doing you can have it display in your DT 400 series throttle you can have the layout control software and use it for layout automation some people are doing some some pretty high-end stuff with this other people have not been interested to this point and it is used by surround tracks by sound tracks to create a realistic sound system for the layout which is why we're reviewing this now because they're coming out with the new product each transponder this installed has a unique address and the transponder decoder can keep track of all this as they go around the transponder decoders sorry even if they're located in the same transponding zone so you can have one zone you have multiple transponders in there and the system can keep up about any questions so far this is the basic stuff okay I think that is related to the railroad and company software and how it's handling the transponding the transponding allows you to track in any zone any number of decoders by their you know active address well that yeah I think I'm not sure what currently happens I think the railroad and company I believe anybody correct me on that how many active locomotives it knows that there's you know half a dozen unique addresses in there but I think it only displays one I don't think it was deeper correct yeah the other thing is you can't get if you bridge the transponder zones for a long time the system will track all the transponders in both zones merged together until you break the current between the two tracks actually no the that would be where you bridge between active transponder zones and you have the current the locomotive metal wheels are connected to those together so now you have two sets of detectors correctly seeing transponding energy in both zones I don't know we've seen some point I just don't remember top my head yeah I thought they had but I guess that hasn't I think yeah I think you're to email you're gonna ask him because I believe you can show him why it's probably a user choice how many active transponders you want to show in any track section because you can get a very busy screen very quickly yeah email you're gonna be pretty good about to get back do you know about that ball what about what you guys do okay so Jeremiah I understand and I know I've seen several programs you know bring up on the screen because the information is out on the network and anybody's listening can see that I believe they have some app is that true yeah so let's talk after about that okay so yeah the transponders in all of our coders the transponders integral inside the decoder generally you know it's going to be the address that the local office where are we flipped up okay so basically you don't need new infrastructure with your boosters new wiring you just need to add the RX1 detector pickups on your track fee and basically turn on the transponding capability in the distracts decoders and hook it up to a BDO168 type detector and you're running that will automatically put the messages on the network telling the anybody listening on the network the decoder number and where it believes which something is impressive and that will track around the network basically I think for five years ago I'm not sure where Jack you know a railroad company was but I know that there's a number of people use different programs that are using that it's not for everybody it's just a high-end type sort of application basically the BDO168's both have the ability to add the transponding if you want but the other flip side of that is actually they have your basic detection sections which is a DC on to the section and that obviously is a step towards doing signaling and in fact one thing I do remember about railroad company is they actually will once I identified a particular decoder in a section or zone they will actually forward that information based on DC occupancy information once it knows the left a yard or a certain point so the programmers can use any level of some sketch they want to track with a combination of transponding detection which will be an area or detection section DC occupancy so we've seen both of those. We've had it up for about 10 or 11 years I guess and the other thing that it can do if you wish is you can as long as you're an instrumented or a transponding detection equipped zone you can now do your operations mode read back automatically it's totally transparent instead of telling you can't do it all the sudden the system will automatically respond with the