kevinlms

If ANY resistor runs hot enough to burn cardboard, the person who did that has no idea of what their doing! Resistors come in different Watt ratings, using a 'standard' 1/4 Watt is being lazy and possibly risking fires. Carbon resistors are commonly available as 1 Watt as well and wire wound ones at 5 or 10 Watt, so no excuse.

I don't mind using the toll roads in Melbourne (East Link is NOT owned by Transurban - although they are looking at the possibility of buying it), as long as they do provide a better product than the freebees. In the case of East Link, it is vastly quicker than using Stud Road, the only viable alternative. However, I admit that I don't have to use toll roads every day.

In Australia, the Country Fire Authority stations had sirens to alert volunteer firemen to come. In their infinite wisdom, it was determined that the sirens weren't required anymore, as pagers/text messages would work better at lower cost. The problem being, that they forgot that this meant dad left the shop when the siren went off, in turn that meant mum left home and went to take over shop duties and grandma, went to the daughters house, where the children had been left alone! All of which was easy, when the whole town could hear the siren. They got reinstated!

As someone whose been in the industry for many years, I agree with most of what you say. However I don't bother with a corded phone on standby, because the infrastructure required is no longer available.

You can actually buy cordless phones, that reverse charge the base in the event of power loss. It does of course reduce the effective life until the batteries go flat. But of course without power to the modem etc, it's useless!

Does anyone care what they do?

But don't make the common mistake that PSTN phone lines 'always worked', that wasn't true either. If the cables in the street were damaged, or the exchange lost power for too long, then they would fail, too. The world employed many 1000's of people repairing/replacing faulty phone lines. Or I know of a major exchange, which had a serious fire and took everything out for weeks, in the surrounding district.

We had an incident at my club today, involving a medical pendant. I answered the phone at the clubrooms and it was a rather anxious wife of a new member. Apparently his pendant kept going off and it was ringing all the default contacts in turn and none could speak to him. So she rang the club, because that was where he was going, but had he crashed the car or something on the way? What made it tricky, was that because he was a new member, I didn't recognise the name, nor did the first person I asked! However we did find someone who knew him and his location at the club grounds. So all good in the end. It turned out that the pendant was under several layers of clothing and he had been bumping the button and not realising. So that raises the question about new members and medical conditions, because we also had another member have a seizure today and ambulance call out, so not an entirely happy day.

Yes, but not lately! 😇

The last 2G service in Australia was turned off in 2018. Later this year 3G will be turned off - one provider already has. Some models of 4G phones won't work on voice calls, as they can't use VoLTE - they use 3G for voice. So be wary of acquiring older tech phones, which MAY themselves need replacing in a short time scale. In short, check with your mobile suppliers, as to when the dates are for turning off, for various tech. REMEMBER, they don't have the full system working one day, the next turned off completely. What they do, is as the date gets closer, they don't repair faulty equipment (maybe a restart, beyond that, they won't spend cash), and so you might end up with localised outages

Which means that you are entitled to complain to the moderators about it, or just move on to the next. Plenty of other posts not funny or repetitive.

Cost me $A23.67 in early December.

Don't know about a 5 way, but if you want lots of point blades (or none), South Australia is a good starting point (sorry for the pun - not really!). https://nrm.org.au/assets/pdfdocs/collections/multi-gauge-muddle.pdf Gladstone Yard appears to be an interesting place.

I know someone who has a very large collection of locomotives and of course uses that as an excuse for no DCC and that he doesn't know how to wire it up. Fact is he spent a lot of money on DC controllers and loads of money on switches etc, on his new large layout. He didn't know how to wire that either, so he needed lots of help from others to wire it for him - no he did virtually no work on it himself, even though several tried to get him to assist, at the very minimum.

What is the voltage of the output of the CDU now?

It would entirely depend on the distance between the 2 point motors. If they were the two ends of a crossover, you'd be hard pressed to measure any difference. If they were at the ends of a passing loop, with the CDU at one end, then maybe there would be a problem. Since the OP has a small compact layout, I doubt whether any such issue would present itself. If he does have a problem, the solution is a thicker or duplicated wire to the furtherest.

Just as well I pay my £12 a year to not get those ads!

I have a number of VCR cassettes of railway items, now the last player I had died, but I inherited a combined VHS/DVD LG player, but remote is missing. With this particular machine, you can't even start something without it. All you can do is insert tapes and discs and eject them! I have a universal remote that claims to be combatable, but blowed if I can get it to work! My brother MIGHT have the remote.

Ok, a fair distance from me! More than adequate. They've gone up by a fair bit, since I last purchased such items. https://www.jaycar.com.au/24vac-1a-unregulated-power-supply-bareends/p/MP3032

Setting it to record something was pointless anyway, because the TV stations started/finished a few minutes out from the published times. Even if you allowed a bit of overlap, chances are that you would miss the start/finish of a show! Having watched a movie on TV and finding that your recording stopped short, 2 minutes before the end, meant that you had wasted the time. My wife used to go to see if she'd caught the end. My view was NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That was MUCH worse, seeing the end of a movie, before you'd seen any of it!!

This site might help. https://www.binnsroad.co.uk/railways/romford/index.html

So where in Oz are you?

Ah yes, the number of people who couldn't record anything, if they weren't home to press the record button!

From the number of hits/fires, they should build a section that when something is coming towards it, opens out and starts the automatic sprinkler system!