I had an opportunity to attend RCX with my kids as it was during spring break. My expectations were set from a 2016 video by RC Sparks:
Flysky iA6 RX – telemetry and failsafe with OpenTX
I ordered an iA6 receiver for a flying wing I picked up at the local R/C swap meet. It took 30 days to get here from China. 😒 How have I not learned not to order stuff during the Chinese New Year? Once I got it, there were a few tricks and troubles I went through, so here’s the rundown.
I specifically purchased the Turnigy iA6 (same as FS-iA6) instead of the iA6B for a few reasons. It has leads coming off of the top instead of the end, so it’s effectively shorter when servo connectors are plugged in. Perfect for the Techone Mini-Popwing which has a small receiver cut-out. It also has a rudimentary telemetry system built in, and the first version (non-B) can be hacked very easily to provide battery voltage telemetry to the transmitter.
The telemetry hack is well covered in the RCGroups link above, so I won’t go into it, but will outline a couple other issues I encountered.
Best budget flying radio: Taranis Q X7
Hands down this is the best radio you can get for around $100. The hobby is moving so fast, it’s incredible what this thing can do! When it first came out, I was skeptical as the go-to radio for most people flying multi-rotors was the Taranis X9D. The X7 has a form-factor very similar to the first Horus which was not initially well-received. But what FrSky had done with the X7 was take everything that was awesome about the X9D (OpenTX, haptic and audio feedback, telemetry, serial module communication) and put it in a Horus-shaped budget package.
I’m not going to go through everything about this radio, there are plenty of other reviews out there – several linked to from here. I just want to suggest an awesome setup that will not only do telemetry with FrSky receivers, but also Spektrum, FlySky, and any other multiprotocol module protocols that support telemetry.
This is a great complete transmitter/receiver setup that will cost you less than $200 and will control just about everything:
- Taranis Q X7
- X4R-SB (for multirotors)
- IRangeX add-on module (uses multiprotocol TX)
- Cheap FlySky RX for foam airplanes, or Telemetry RX for fancier models.
- Bind-and-Fly for everything else