What an amazing response, I feel like I've joined a club already! I will pursue the local club, it has a reasonably up to date website so perhaps I caught the secretary on a bad day.
I'm more interested in design and build than flying to be honest but I do need to learn to fly! I've been practicing with PicaSim and a cheap X-box controller and I can now land in simulated blustery conditions! Taking a cue from the recent Correx articles I'm thinking that a cheap sacrificial trainer might be my first project. My life-long ambition has been to build a much more sophisticated ornithopter than we've seen so far and it seems that technology in all areas has finally reached the stage where that might be possible without a military sized budget. This would require a semi-autonomous control of some sort hence the Raspberry Pi or Arduino etc.
However, before diving into that, I feel totally ignorant about the radio gear I see advertised. If Futaba advertises an 8 channel Tx but puts in brackets 16 channel SBUS, does the 8 channel refer to PWM only? If yes, then with only two sticks how are the other 4 PWM channels controlled? Transmitters are festooned with switches which presumably only have two or three positions so I presume they wouldn't use a PWM channel.
I'm also baffled by the prices. I can't afford over a grand for a Futaba system but on the other hand, from what I've read so far, ELRS does what I need and a Radiomaster unit appears to offer this at a fraction of the price.
This is why I need to join a club and just talk to a few people who can put me straight!
Many thanks for everyone's input.
Bob