Walt Rubino showed his Great Planes Fokker DR1, ARF which he bought in 1998, but has since been discontinued. He has just finished building it. It is powered by a Magnum .91 engine and has JR 537 servos. Very nice job!
Bill Kline snowed his SIG XA41 with a Power 32 electric motor which runs on 4 cells. It needs speed control adjustment. The hatch has pins in front and magnets in the back. He also showed his newly purchased RC Hobby Professional electric helicopter with dual rotors and lights.
Tim Bartlow showed his Quaker with an 80” wingspan. It was acquired originally from a 1936 estate and he later bought partially finished from Tony Kistner. It’s a very nice and easy flyer.
Rich Alloway showed his FrSky (pronounced “free sky”) Taranis X9D transmitter, which he bought from Aloft Hobbies (FrSky’s top distributor in the US), and later added a Spektrum DX4 Module. It cost about $240 + shipping. It included a FrSky 8 channel telemetry receiver. The radio is bidirectional with telemetry coming back from the receiver. The telemetry receivers send back signal strength information which can be used to ensure that you don’t go out of range. There is an internal FrSky radio module inside the transmitter and a JR-style module port on the rear of the unit. Each radio is capable of us to 16 channels and both modules can be active at the same time, control. Since most of his receivers are Spektrum or Spektrum-compatible, he needed to add Spektrum support to his Taranis. He found online that the radio module can be pulled from a DX4e transmitter and used in another transmitter in order to provide full DSM2+DSMx support to a non- Spektrum transmitter. Using a spare JR-style module enclosure from Dean Pollock, he put together the radio module that he took from his DX4e transmitter with a voltage regulator in order to build his own JR-style Spektrum module. The regulator drops the approx 8.4v battery voltage down to a stable 3.3v that was needed by the radio. The transmitter uses software from an Open Source project called OpenTX, which is a free, community supported operating system for several different computerized transmitters. FrSky’s Taranis X9D is the first transmitter to use OpenTX as the official software. Since the software that runs the radio is available at no cost, the cost of the radio is purely for the hardware. The Taranis is definitely *not* a plug-and-play transmitter! Don’t expect to pull it out of the box and bind it to a plane. It took him many hours to program it for all of his airplanes. If anyone has an OpenTX transmitter (or a transmitter that they can install OpenTX on), he would be happy to help them out with setup and tweaking.
