Parental Advisory: It’s gonna get a little N-Scale up in here for the next few weeks at least. You’ve been warned.

I regularly do dodgey electrical stuff. Possibly risky, but I’ve only once actually electrocuted myself on 240v AC current. However when I say my hacked up hot wire is unspeakably dodgey, I think it requires a picture (click for more detail):

Yes, that is a couple of bare ends of wire with some nichrome soldered across them. The socket on the end plugs straight into a 4 Amp 12V DC supply. But it worked, and it worked damn well. I did need my lovely wife on hand to manage the power input (i.e. unplugging the wire when I wanted to put it down). Read on to see what it did for me.

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To be honest, I never saw myself as a train geek. Sure, I’ve always loved seeing model trains rolling around nicely designed layouts. I think my first experience was the grand old layout at MOTAT, and since my son was old enough, we’ve made regular trips to view the amazing club layouts at the Model-X exhibition. I always took the position that these incredibly detailed dioramas were the domain of a peculiar type of geekery; one that I might delve into once retired, but not before. I never saw the irony as I spent hours carefully painting a single 20mm Eldar Farseer over the course of several days, while frowning on the fine-scale geekery of railroad modellers.

Sure, I’d done a tiny bit of research into trains, assuming that the most popular HO scale was the only way to go, and that the complicated setup of switched track sections was the only way to run multiple trains on a single track. The commitment required for HO scale just didn’t sit well with me. I don’t have an entire room or basement to dedicate to trainery.

Then I somehow stumbled across N Scale and DCC. I could describe N-Scale in great detail, but you’ll be better served by the knowledge that ‘N’ is short for Nine, as in Nine millimetres, being the track gauge in N Scale. Additionally, Wikipedia (as usual) has more than enough information on the genre.

As a computer and electronics nerd, my discovery of DCC was even more exciting. Once again, Wikipedia can tell you more than you’d ever want to know about Digital Command and Control. From my point of view, using electronics to address and command trains just makes more sense than old fashioned Direct Current.

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So HDTV has finally arrived in New Zealand. I have to say I’m very impressed. After some tips from my last post, I ended up with a 32″ V Series Bravia and a terrestrial Freeview box.

I’m positive there were cheaper and better deals than the TV I got, but I’m very happy with it. The menu system in the Bravia is very intuitive, and I especially like the ability to label A/V inputs and “skip” unused inputs. I only actually use two inputs on the TV now, both HDMI: one for Freeview and one for the XBox 360. I’ve set up the TV so that those are the only inputs that show up when you hit the input select button.

And Freeview. Very nice. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time watching the HD test channel (ch 100), which is just amazing. They started off last week with Sony Bravia demos on constant rotation. Flowers, cherry blossoms, Greek islands. All very nice. Now they are running nature docos. The way to describe it is that it looks more like a “moving photo” than some sort of transmitted video image.

But the HD world is not all fluffy bunnies. With the current bout of bad weather, we’ve been getting some nasty corruption on the TVNZ channels. I’m not too worried, because quite frankly I was surprised that we could get Freeview reception at all given how snowy our analog UHF reception is.

My plan is to swing our aerial around to point at the Sky Tower. We’re currently receiving our TVNZ signal off the Waiatarua tower on channel 29, which is showing up on the test page as OK strength, but not fantastic quality. If I manually change the Freeview box to channel 28 (Sky Tower), it shows bursts of good strength, but poor quality, so I’m hoping by aligning the aerial properly we’ll get the quality up. My only question is whether I need to change the aerial from horizontal to vertical to match the change in polarisation from the transmitter? Any RF geeks reading?

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So I’ve been tasked with buying a Freeview box and HDTV for the in-laws this weekend. Anyone got any good suggestions for a medium-sized LCD in the $1500-$2500 range? Current thinking is to go and look at Panasonics and Sonys in that price range, and just pick the one with the nicest picture and best inputs.

Yes, I’m aware of the pitfalls regarding in-store lighting and default brightness settings, so I’ll keep my bullshit detectors on high sensitivity.

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I sense an obsession coming on…

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