I’VE JUST RETURNED from the E-Fest
indoor electric festival held in Champaign,
Illinois, and hosted by Great Planes. This year
more than 250 pilots participated! I had a
great time and learned a lot.
One of the hot topics of the event was
Futaba’s introduction of its new spread
spectrum aircraft system. The FASST (Futaba
Advanced Spread Spectrum Technology) is
based on the Futaba 6EX transmitter.
Approximately 15 of the new systems
were in operation during the event by Futaba
team pilots and Hobbico staff members. It
was great to see these systems operating with
no difficulty alongside the Spektrum systems,
72 MHz systems, 900 MHz systems, 27 MHz
systems, and even infrared systems. All of
them played together perfectly.
The Futaba system is an FHSS (frequencyhopping
spread spectrum) system. This is new
to the air-radio side of things. By the time you
read this we will have a system at AMA
Headquarters for testing and have already
started an article to tell you more about the
technology employed by Futaba in this system.
Look for this article in an issue of MA very
soon.
I almost forgot! This system is advertised
as full range, so you should be able to fly any
model you want with it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this
is going to prove to be an exciting year for
radio control. I will be surprised if we don’t
see more new systems introduced yet this year.
One of the other things I did while at EFest
was log some parameters in certain
aircraft while in flight. Using an onboard data
logger we recorded voltage, current draw,
amount of power removed from the battery,
battery temperature, motor rpm, and
headspeed in helicopters.
Our purpose in this is to get a better handle
on what our electric model systems are doing
while in flight and to see where the potential
for failures might be. I was shocked (pun
intended) to see some of the current draws
obtained with most models doing 3-D-type
flying. Granted, most of these high-current
draws were momentary spikes, but they were
there just the same.
A lot more study must go into this, and we
must install the loggers in many more aircraft
to get good information. However, does a
momentary 60-amp draw on a 35-amp speed
control sound like a good thing to you? It just
goes to show that most speed controls can
handle a momentary high current way above
the rated amount.
Anyway, stay tuned for more on this topic
as we collect more information.
The AMA Electronic Technology Committee
(ETC), which used to be the Frequency
Committee, will meet April 16 with a full
agenda. We will initially gather in a combined
meeting with the AMA Safety Committee to
discus Li-Poly battery safety—specifically
what AMA can do to better educate the
membership on safe practices for the care and
feeding of these battery systems.
The ETC will discuss many other items,
including a short seminar on spread spectrum
systems by Futaba and Spektrum
representatives. I’ll have a full report on the
meeting in a future column.
Til next time …
Edition: Model Aviation - 2007/04
Page Numbers: 178