Its Been Flown . . .

I have gotten a number of sorties on the Big Stik 60 now, enough to rip the main landing gear off. That was a conversion error, my eror. I had installed a quarter inch thick plywood block to mount the landdnig gearinside the fueslage. When I glued it in place, I failed to tie it into the plywood longerons, so it was just supported by the balsa skin. The balsa did not last too long. So it broke out on landing. Not pretty.

But I put it back into place, and fiber glass the patch from the out side. I then added a couple of gussets on the inside using epoxy cement to glue it together. It is well tied into the structure now and should hold up for a long time. I had to add a bit of lead in the back end to compensate for the added weight up front, the fiber glass, extra epoxy and gussets. It is nice and balanced and flies quiet well. I also pushed the tank up a little further, so there was a shift of weight forward and thus the lead is necessary to compensate.

The new 2.4 GigaHertz equipment is glitch free, not hits now. And a new battery insures a lot of power and reserve. I had some trouble getting the battery to perform, but after several cycles, it came up and is doing just well. So new battery, super switch, new receiver set and transmitter module and I was ready to go.

The new receiver has really two separate receivers, you locate one on the floor of the model with its two antennas facing the sides of the model and the secondary receiver on the side of the model and its two antennas facing fore and aft. That covers the spectrum for reception. The 2.4 stuff can be highly directional and thats why the orientation must be different. The two receivers are tied together and that ensures a positive signal catch under all the potential directions.

I had a bit of trouble getting everything working. The Spektrum instructions were a little lacking. One has to "bind" the receiver set to the transmitter. When that is done, the receiver only recognizes the tranmitter to which it is "bound." That means no one else can send a signal to your airplane except only except your transmitter. So frequency control is a thing of the past.

Spektrum failed to be explicit about turn on and off procedures. One has to turn on the transmitter first, then the receiver. The binding process requires that one press a button on the RF module down, turn on the transmitter, then the receiver set. The receivers each have a light emitting diode, and the diode begins flashing. That indicates it is receiving the signal. After a few seconds, the diodes stop flashing and go solid in color (in this case red). The solid color indicates the receiver set is bound to the transmitter. You can release the button and things are all locked up to your transmitter.

After that, general use, preparation to fly one must always turn on the tranmitter first, then the receiver set. Do it backwards, and the receiver set forgets and loses its binding to the transmitter. Spektrun fails to point out this to the user - pretty bad in my mind.

But once you get all that down, it is super duper. I get all the neat bells and whistles that comes with the 8UAP transmitter. At one time the 8 channel 8UAP was the top of the line. No so anymore but it is still one powerful device. 8 channels is more than enough for me at any time and its powerful, albeit dated, programming process allows all kinds of things to be done. Besides I know how to program it now so it is okay by me.

So I have the best of the best and works. No more hits, no more interference from microwave signals over running my 72 MegaHertz systems. I dont' know if that was the real problem, but I am not having any problems any more. Hummm.

Cheers. Keep your heads down, Ike is coming.