Focus on Competition
Technical Update
Steve Kaluf Technical Director [email protected]
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 (frequency-hopping 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 E-Fest 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
- 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 well 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 discuss 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.
Till next time... MA
Note: The National Records will appear in the May 2007 issue of MA.
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
