Electronics

As usually the Electronics are one of the most expensive (read profitable) areas to spend your hard earned cash, I looked at ways of reducing the cost. Some of these are below.

1) Building your own Receiver (Rx)

a) Building Report - Micron "Club" Rx Kit. (£15.95)

This is a 7 channel , single conversion (SC), PPM only, Rx. The seventh channel is optional using a jumper wire. Fully built kits are also available at around the £24.00 mark which is good value.

I built two of these from parts supplied.

There are two PCB's to complete, the Decoder and Receiver boards. These are enclosed by a 2 piece plastic case, which slides together and is held by a channel identifier sticker.

The decoder board took 1/2 an hour and the Receiver board 1 hour to completely populate. A magnifying glass type light was very useful due to the small size of some of the components.

While it's not really a beginners starter project, the instructions are 90% good and the finished article is easy to test (no electronic test gear necessary). Both of mine worked properly first time.

Only a servo and a small screwdriver is need to set up and optimise the Rx.

Testing static in plane with Tx worked perfectly.

Range check at 50 paces worked ok too.

Verdict :- Excellent so far, no more commercial £44.00 jobs for me.............

Available from ;

b) Flying Test Report.

This Rx is ensconced in my "Dracula" plane using a Futaba Skysport 6 Tx and standard PPM(SC) Futaba crystal in both. Despite pancaking it twice hard, the Rx has come through it without a scratch.

The second is in "Anduril" and will be reported on in due course. Anduril hit the ground 6 times hard without any problems apart from having to re-tune the Rx. It is now in "Testbed-1" and working fine.

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