Radio Control Blog
Dear hobby shop owners and employees,
This is a plea, asking you to get to know your competition. If you don’t know what a Turnigy 9x or an XT60 is, you’ve become a slave to your distributors, and your customers are likely going to leave you behind. There is an enterprising young man named Anthony Hand who moved to China and started a company called HobbyKing. You should pay attention to what they (and others) are doing as they’re rewriting the rules of radio control hobbies.
I got super-cheap HK-T6A V2 6-channel radio for my first model airplane. It’s great because it’s programmable using a computer and a specialized USB cable. Using the USB cable, you can also play simulators such as FMS and RC Desk Pilot (among others). Did I also mention it’s dirt cheap?!?
After I built another plane and also purchased a small multi-rotor, I quickly realized the need for a transmitter that could handle multiple models. The Turnigy 9x fit the bill. I kept my old HK-T6A for using on the simulator and now my son will use it to fly his FT Flyer.
The 9x has a trainer switch and a trainer port, so I wondered if I could buddy-box these two radios. There’s plenty of information out there regarding modifications to buddy box two HK-T6As, but using the 9x as the master and the T6A as the slave seems like it would only require a specialized cable with no modification to either radio.
After buying a secondhand TC5 chassis for VTA racing, I had a leftover HPI RS4. Rather than letting it collect dust, I asked Jules if he’d like to invite his cousin Reese to go racing with us, of course the answer was yes. We had an extra unpainted Mini Cooper body and I was able to load up the unused chassis with super-cheap electronics like a silver-can motor for $4 and brushed ESC for $10.
In the spirit of Crawl, Walk, Run, after racing twice in the USGT class and doing nothing much but crashing and annoying lapping traffic, I decided it was time to slow down. I repurposed my HPI RS4 for US Vintage Trans-Am, commonly known as VTA.
I wanted to drive a great looking muscle car, something I could see myself driving in real life. One image that was stuck in my mind was this Challenger:
Looking for an electronic speed controller (ESC) for your R/C car than can handle both 1-cell (1S) and 2-cell (2S) lithium polymer (lipo) batteries has proven to be a difficult landscape to navigate. Some of this has to do with what the market will bear. Typically if you’re running a 1/12 scale car, you’re only running 1S batteries. If you’re running a 1/10 scale car, it’s 2S.
The 1S need for me comes from the fact that here in Minnesota, the local track runs a variant of Vintage Trans-Am (VTA) that uses a 17.5 turn motor and single cell battery. It was a carry-over from 1/12 scale cars that ran on 4-cell NiCad or NiMH batteries. The idea was to keep the VTA cars relatively slow, and to keep the cost down.
[Read more…]I got this thing from Hobby King for just $20!
I’m sure there’s some nay-sayers out there who will talk about “glitching” and yadda-yadda, but I’ve had less problems with this radio than my entry-level Spektrum DX2E which is 3x the cost.
It has a bunch of poorly documented features, but they’re features none-the-less (the instruction manual is simply terrible).