With the onset of 2.4GHz technology in our hobby, I wanted to start a discussion about the new digital radios.

I wanted to point out one difference between an analog receiver and digital 2.4GHz DSM receiver and the importance of the amount of charge on the receiver battery. 

With a low battery on a analog RX, your servos simply do not respond as fast or produce as much torque, but you still have basic functionality and control; however, with a digital receiver, when the voltage drops below a certain threshold, a "brownout" will occur where you do not have basic functionality or control.  In this case, if the battery voltage recovers above the threshold with the momentary loss of the load of the servos, you will still have to wait for the RX to "reboot" which may be several seconds before you gain control again.  This just emphasizes the importance of battery maintenance and the need to check your RX battery before each flight. 

With the introduction of LiPoly batteries, there are now a lot of voltage regulators on the market that supply 6V to servos and RX from higher voltage LiPoly batteries. These regulators typically have large capacitors in them to help with the high loads of digital servos that would help prevent voltage drop and "brownouts".  Most of these are available for helicopters now, but could also be used for our aircraft and generally have indicators on them to let you know when your battery is running low.

If anyone has any other comments about digital radios, or have any recommendations, please post them here.

I finally found my way back to this.  I dunno if this would help, but seems pretty simple to add a capacitor...

http://www.spektrumrc.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=SPM1600

-=Tom=-