Air Crash investigation needed

[Mark B]

Sorry, I keep forgetting to mention i live and fly in New Zealand.

40mhz is legal for aircraft here. 29mhz is our car and boat channel.

The only 2.4 i have is a futaba FASST 6EX. only use it for one model though, the hairy gnome (see pictures). one glitch and it will end up in the deck so i used the best tx i had available.

 

Thanks for pointing out potential errors.

Safety first.

 

Mark.

[wlfk]

Something I often see on the model helicopter forums is people with absolutely abominable receiver installations. There are a few ways to stop the receivers from working, ranging from nipping the coax sleeve of the wire to installing the antennae at the same angle or too close to metal or carbon surfaces.

 

I've had only one lockout. I had set up my T-Rex 450 with a video monitor (2.4 ghz) and was flying about 100 feet away using a Futaba 6EX 2.4ghz system. I recognised that I was stretching the system but it had passed the range check with flying colours. The lockout occurred when the helicopter was oriented such that the vertical antenna was shielded by the carbon frame and the only transmission path was vertical transmitter antenna to horizontal receiver. Luckily I was hovering and the helicopter just landed horizontally with very little damage.

 

The lessons I took from that are that 1) orientation matters and 2) the systems can be remarkably good.

 

Technically though, I sometimes wonder whether what we actually need is 2 transmitter aerials oriented at 90 degrees, as well as two receiver aerials. With 1->2 there is still one orientation in which the receiver should theoretically receive no signal whatsoever.

 

Incidentally, somebody mentioned that on 2.4ghz systems you can orient the antenna better than on older systems. This is true, but it's also much more necessary at the shorter wavelengths.