I'm whining about this investment because I don't have the luxury of an open account to purchase extras for my car. My wife is not accepting this hobby as well as a lot your wives. At the end of the day, to her, I just spent $1000 on a little toy. To me, I just spent $1000 on psychiatric help. I do have a couple other expensive hobbies, so I have to spread out my hobby funds. I just spent $300 on new sand tires for the quads.

Anyhow, the biggest issue I have is my kids race also. Therefore, whatever I buy, I have to times that by 3.

This hobby doesn't really help our Mylaps. Mylaps makes a transponder for every type of racing, including full-size cars, motorcycles, bikes, etc...

I was just going to bring that up. LiveRC has been posting numbers for active racers for over a year now. Think one week exceeded 10,000.
I think the price maybe a case of lower demand equals higher price. I’m pretty sure the price has gone up since I bought my first 4 years ago. Remember seeing a 4 pack deal then that dropped price to around $65 each. But could not imagine needing 4 at that time.

YES!

And moving transponders between cars during race days SUCKS. I've had the same 2 (I had 3) AMB DP for about 10 years now. Still work great. But the other drivers in the family want to get their lap times on practice days as well.. so that mean everyone needs at least one and we have multiple vehicles in addition to our personal ones.

So the track and the whole RC world has to adapt to your budget?
I have just one other option for you, search for the homemade counting systems on this forum and build your own transponder, they are the old DP RC2 compatible and will cost you not more than a few dollar each.

The funny thing is that AMB did start with making a system for the RC hobby. The founder of AMB is family of Pieter Bervoets, Pieter is the co-founder of Serpent RC cars, in that time known as Berton.

Easy Roelof.
I never said anything about changing the RC world to fit my budget. Fact is, nobody did, but a lot of guys, in this hobby, are trying to keep things budgeted. We just think these items are a little too pricey and why tracks are finding Mylaps as almost their main counting system when there are other systems and have transponders that are a lot cheaper. It is strictly our opinion, which we are allowed to have. If you prefer to pay $100 for a $2 part, then go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. As for where AMB started, I did not say they didn't start here. I was saying that this hobby isn't really their main concern and that they have broadened their field.

I remember the transponders back in the 90's. They were so big that you had to, some times, re-arrange your electronics to get it to fit in your buggy. You would install it by drilling a hole in your body and hold it in place with a body clip.

Buy once, cry once. MyLaps.

Yes the Mylaps are expensive. But they last a long time. I still have one AMB RC personal transponder left that I still use to race. Bought it back in 2007. What other piece of equipment do I still use that I bought that long ago? The answer, nada. And to boot, the resale value on them is pretty good, better than any other item in RC. Just buy the Mylaps, when you don't want it anymore sell it for 75-80% of what you bought it for.

NOT TRUE!!!

I know of many MyLaps customers crying foul when their local tracks updated the firmware to the RC4.5 decoder and their AMBrc DP PT's stopped working, they were forced to send in their old units and had to pay an "upgrade fee"... so with MyLaps you will be "extorted" for more money the next time they decide to change their frequency pattern

The famous IT question: "Why update if it works fine?"
Some people are too fast doing an update w/o any reason.... But the update was not needed.

True, Mylaps should have warn the world about the huge change with v4.5 and I think it would be nice if they provide an option to go back but who is running Win10 on their old P166 machine? It is a same question, the same as most people get a new smartphone ebery 2 year.
I know far before RC4 came out we had an exchange program, 25 euro for a new hybrid transponder by turning in your old one, most had the RC2 and some even a IPT which was accepted as well.

A few months ago I had a talk with a guy from Mylaps, he was at the club which is close to the Mylaps headquarter. I gave him some sugestions to look at, he was investigating why some people are still running RC2 transponders. I sugested him to give a low exchange price for a new oe and give people the option to get an RC4 transponder with their old RC2 number because people are used to their number. But one of the reasons of V4.5 is indeed to rule out other brands transponders.

I'm not arguing with you. These transponders will last until the firmware changes, which is a long time. I'm sure that's why they cost so much, because they are considered to be a one-and-done purchase. That is why things are made to break. The part that makes us shake our head is the cost of it. This little devise cost you $100. your buggy cost you $300. You see the difference? If you paid the same markup on your car as you did you buggy, you would spend over $5000 for your buggy. If these manufacturers could sell us a buggy for $5000, I'm sure they would last us over 10 years also. The technology these cars have are not new. They have been around for over 30 years.

bottom line is, we know it is-what-it-is and there is nothing we can do buy complain and hope we are heard the issue is fixed. I'm not trying to be a cheap butt. I would just like to stretch out my dollar so I'm not constantly trying to figure out when or how I am going to get my upgrades so I can stay in this hobby. Again, this is not my only hobby. To give you an idea, since April, of this year, I have dropped almost $20,000 on two brand new dirt bikes and a quad. For this hobby, I have spent at least $2,000. This doesn't include my fishing hobby, camping equipment, and motorcycle riding gear.

As far as I know, there's no option to 'not update' if you buy a new decoder. Every company has its own business to protect, R&D to pay etc, and that's perfectly fine. But the sentence above in not an official statement, nor will ever be said in a court debate. That is in a slippery subject that might even turn against MyLaps. I think just patents protect the timing system, and most of them I guess are expired by now.
As one of the developers of a DIY timing system, I say again that if you want a 'worlds-ready' system, a company supporting it, a certified product and everything else that Mylaps delivers, well of course there's a price to pay that cannot be just the sum of the chips inside the transponder. But this I guess is valid for every product. The monopoly may not feel 'comfortable', but think about the fact that it's maybe one of the main reasons we haven't changed transponder every few years (made by small companies going bankrupt).

My buggy is not FCC nor CE certified... big $$$ saved. The markup cannot be the same. And it's nice to see timing results on the web... and that server has a mangement cost every day even if nobody looks at it. The products are different, but I guess we might even discover that the buggy markup is not that much lower.

Convenient timing on this post. 2 for sale. As long as track hasn’t done the system update. Not $25 apiece as suggested from overseas

2 transponders