Having tremendous amounts of fun fitting the equipment
Quite a few vehicles in my fleet are ex-London - none of them were fitted with hearing loops, so I'm progressively having them done. Having the Mobitec and Lawo blind boxes replaced with Hanover LEDs has produced some complications when fitting the Mobitec internal display, controller and integration unit, so these are all being taken apart and wired again from scratch. Further buses have entered the fleet which have Mobitec roller blinds, so hopefully will be easier to swap with Mobitec LEDs.
Meanwhile on the programming front, I'm making tracks with Mobi Info Edit Advanced and Hanover Central/HELEN. I've finally got MIE doing the announcements and internal displays just the way I want them done. I've created a separate database for the Welsh routes - spent a fair amount of time programming in the announcements and displays in both English and Welsh and will shortly be enlisting the services of a Welsh speaker to ensure pronunciation and grammatical context are spot on. I've chosen to standardise on the Welsh vocabulary used by Transport for Wales, a challenge has been to get the displays to show the characters correctly. For example, the â with the circumflex isn't available in all of the native MIE fonts, but to me it's important to get it right. My Citaro 2 is having some very heavy duty exhaust system repairs, but once it's back, testing will be done before it goes out in service next month.
While I have a Hanover EG4 on order to fit in one Citaro, another bus is entering the fleet which was specced with an older HTC/DG3 setup, so another system to get to grips with! Joy of joys!