Well, having had my Dynamis for less than a week I thought an initial review from a DCC newbie might be of some use to people who are thinking of making the leap.

Bachmann Dynamis DCC Controller (36-505)

The unit comes with everything you need to get it up and running, with the exception of a Bachmann power clip, although this isn't necessary for operation. They even give you 4 AAA batteries for the handset.

The manual is a whopping 28 pages thick (including the front and back covers) but covers all the functions in an easy to understand way.

After having a flick through the manual I connected the base unit to the track and had a loco moving within seconds. The joystick control takes a little bit of getting used to, but the 'push to increase speed' isn't too tricky (although I have tried pulling back to reverse direction which just slows the loco down).

Naming a loco, changing the address, speed steps and assigning an icon to the loco is pretty simple using the on screen menu system. You get the option of programming on the main track or on a service track. With the low number of locos I have at the moment I just remove the other loco's from the track and programme on the main track but use the service track option as this lets you use 4 digit addressing.

Switching between loco's is as easy as pushing the joystick sideways until the loco you want is displayed. You can go straight to a loco address if you want to go down that route, but I prefer to use the scroll option.

If you are using a multi-function decoder, you can access f0 to f9 at the push of a single button. You can also set these to either latching or non-latching which is useful if you have different functions on different locos and some need to be just a momentary action.

The only little niggle I have with the unit is that you can lose connection between the handset and the receiver, but this will be sorted out with finding a suitable mounting location for the receiver and a bit of 'driver training'. I have extended the signal loss timeout to never so that the trains don't stop when the signal is lost.

The other drawback is that you can't read the CV's from the decoders on the layout, although I believe that this will be a function of the Pro unit when that is released.

I'm certainly pleased with how easy it is to set up and operate and all the controls are nicely to hand.