It also says in the manual that if you are within 20ft of your train, you don't need a repeater. Most operators are, so this isn't really a big issue when visiting others layouts. Unless you are in the habit of staying in the corner while you operate your train on the other side of the arena.
This is true, and even staying in the corner might not present any problem, I just went to the other side of the house (over 20ft), closed all the doors in between myself and an LM, pointed the HC the opposite direction to the LM and it was just fine, through three walls. I wouldn't call my house an RF hot zone though.
I am however thinking scalability, and when I say that I'm thinking mega layout (think FREMO size), in a club setting you may not be able to follow your train very well, at a train show you may very well be running your trains from one end of the layout, and also while the HC is portable the CI-1 in effect is not; not unless you want to carry a laptop around following your train or have a laptop in the middle of a room (thinking of future automation / monitoring etc more than individual control of a train by a person here).
I'd like to know how well RP scales up from simply running a train around the walls of a bedroom to controlling on a mega layout where you might not be able to continuously walk around with your train.
- Tim