Battery Problems
You can never be too careful!
In the last year, I've spent a fortune on high capacity batteries for both my transmitter (1600mAh) and receivers (1300mAh) and a fast field charger, mainly because I'm using more powerful servos these days.
Although it was heading towards winter, and flights tend to be shorter duration, I started to lose radio control of my favourite model and was very fortunate to recover from the spiral dive it was in. With the transmitter held as high as possible, I was able to land the model. Although I have PCM failsafe active, the throttle didn't cut leading me to believe I had a receiver battery problem rather that an interference one - apart from which no-one else was switched on!
The receiver battery pack had dropped to about 4.6V. This was despite a full overnight charge and only having had three or four ten minute flights. Strange!
However, I had been pratting around with the engine - a new one - and on one flight it went deadstick. I landed it OK some distance away. I suspect that in the five minutes or so it took me to get the model back, it had been "suspended" in the surrounding scrubland on some of it's control surfaces. This resulted in greatly increased current drain on the batteries.
Subsequent cycling of the battery pack showed that it was not faulty.
There's a few lessons here!
- Watch your time when switched on and check your batteries.
- There's no point in having a fast charger if you don't use it.
- Just because your transmitter reads a high voltage, there's no guarantee your receiver pack is OK.
- I tend to fly well out and quite a bit higher than most. If I'd been flying lower, the model would have been history. When I lost control, the model was quite far away so if it had crashed, it would have made a hole "away over there" which is a damn' sight better than "right here"!