Hello Everyone,
My name is Heath and I live close to Roanoke, VA. I have been playing with trains since I was a child – I have a picture somewhere that shows me opening an HO Bachmann set on Christmas when I was 5yo. Now that I’m older I model Norfolk Southern in HO scale. My layout is in the top floor of my barn. All my current engines are made by Kato. When I was younger I dabbled in N scale, but my eyesight simply would not allow me to continue doing so due to cornea damage when I was 13yo.
In real life I’m a full-time, in-home caregiver and farmer. I still live on the farm I grew up on and currently raise sheep, ducks and chickens listed by The Livestock Conservancy as endangered. I also grow Orchardgrass/Clover hay. I stay very busy most of the time, but when the weather gets cold I really enjoy working on my trains.
All these years I’ve been a staunch supporter of DC operation. I’ve never had even the slightest inkling to give DCC a chance. Several years ago I saw KPack’s YouTube videos and I thought RailPro was the neatest thing I’d seen come along in model railroading in many years. I knew RailPro or something similar was the future of model railroading.
I thought I’d give it a few years and see how Ring Engineering’s Railpro system faired. So, here I am very much ready to install RailPro in all my engines this winter. Unfortunately, I and everyone I know has Hughesnet as an internet service provider and they use NAT444. Thanks to the fantastic UDP Test program provided on these forums for helping me figure that out. Thus far, I have been unable to download any software from Ring Engineering.
Until I joined this forum and used the UDP Test Program I had become so frustrated that I was going to give up on RailPro and stick to DC. Seriously, I had gotten so frustrated that if I had hair it would be on the floor around my computer chair.
Anyway, I’m glad I found these forums. I’ll have to figure out some other way to get the software from Ring, but now that I know that I have the NAT444 issue I feel much better about being able to use RailPro in the future.
Thanks,
Heath