On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 09:08:45AM -0600, Bob Johnson wrote: | As I see it, the biggest 'problem' with using one in a glider is that the | receiver has two antennae, each 3.75 inches in length that should be kept at | right angles to one-another.
Apparantly each antenna is for a completely seperate RX on a different 1 MHz channel (but being spread spectrum, these channels can be shared with others), so if one gets a good signal and one doesn't, you're still good. So having them at right angles will give you a better chance of picking up at least one signal for any given orientation, but even having them both at 180 degrees (i.e. straight) wouldn't be any worse than a 72 MHz RX with a perfectly straight antenna (which is pretty common.) Bigger problems that I see are that the range is limited (though they haven't really said just how limited -- but from what I've heard it's somewhere between 1000 and 3000 feet) and that if you have a carbon fiber fuselage, getting the antenna out of the fuse might be difficult. Note that the limited range might very well exasberate any sub-optimal antenna orientations. Also, being that it's 2.4 GHz, I'd strongly suggest against putting any 2.4 GHz transmitters into your plane -- like any telemetry or video transmitter. Even if the exact frequencies used differ, I'd still expect it to desense the RX and reduce the range even more. I've never used one of the systems myself, but from what I've seen they work fine. The TX is a pretty basic computer radio, and there's only six channels to work with so using it with a full house glider will probably mean giving up some things, but I'll bet they're just the thing at the slope with simpler planes. They'd also be nice for situations where you have what looks like a great slope or site, but it's only a mile away from an established club and so you don't really dare flying there with traditional equipment. They need to hurry up and get a 8+ channel system with full range and a more featured transmitter (either that or modules for existing radios.) It would be like a license to print money ... -- Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED] My favorite kind of wild animal is on a plate. --Homer Simpson RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
