mattnew

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These all came to me through my father. He had been an avid free flight pilot through the late 40's and started RC in the 50's... He also kept everything from these eras. I know a bit about some of these radios, some are older than others, I learned to fly on the EK radio and used the micropro quite a bit in the early 90's. Many are before my time and I know next to nothing about them. I'm going through them, cleaning the dust off them and seeing what works and doesn't work presently.

I thought I'd share some pictures. If anyone has any useful information, comments are appreciated.

Ace 5 channel, EK Logictrol 5 Channel, and Ace MicroPro 8000 Single stick:
The EK and MicroPro8000 work great still, and were used as recently as last year. The Ace 5 Channel at some point had the batteries leak in it... I'm not sure what to do with it really at this point. It is probably salvageable, but not without significant work.
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2 HeathKit gda-19-1 and a Blue Max:
The GDA-19 seem to power on, I haven't gotten any further with them. I know nothing about the Blue Max. It is interesting b/c both sticks have springs on the vertical channels, so they both center all 4 ways.


close up of guts to gda-19 and blue max


Controllaire Galloping Ghost

I know the last time this was used it worked.. but other than that.. no idea. The receiver and servo are a bit dusty, but other than that no real corrosion. Maybe a little in the battery box of the transmitter, but that should be able to be cleaned up relatively easily.

Strat2003

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It's neat seeing some of these again, but a little depressing to realize that the 'modern stuff' of my youth is now 'vintage'.
The Blue Max (with those big 4-wire S4 servos) was my first digital proportional radio, a big step up from escapements and galloping ghost.

mattnew

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Whats interesting here is the leaps in technology from the galloping ghost up to the blue max. With those two radios you really went from marginal control of your plane to having the potential to truly fly an airplane for the first time. Since then changes have really been incremental.. with some changes being what I'd consider a step back.


If you take away the marketing and the jargon and all the "noise" surrounding which radio manufacturer is better...The new radios are really 99% exactly the same as what you see here. Don't believe me?

You have:
your inputs, which consist of a set of switches, maybe 6 - 8, and 1 or 2 analog control sticks, todays radios are mostly 2 analog control sticks

Those signals go to an encoder which takes all the appropriate input switches and stick positions and turn them into a PPM signal. The encoder has gotten more complex ( allowing mixing, flight modes, etc ) but it is essentially the same at its root, take in switch positions, output PPM. Computer radios add a $10 ARM core to the board for encoding so you can set up a more complex function but in reality when you have a small number of inputs, the code here can't get that complex.

The output PPM goes to some type of RF deck, whether it was 72Mhz or 2.4Ghz...



so this is a 72mhz AM RF deck on channel 42...



and here is your 2.4Ghz deck...



just doesn't seem like a whole lot of change when you look at the nuts and bolts...

mattnew

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btw I haven't had a chance to fire up the blue max yet. It looks to be in decent condition and should work, but the antenna has rotted off the receiver and I haven't sourced a replacement yet.... we shall see. Eventually I hope to have them all working.


I was able to get the micropro working and actually upgraded it to a 2.4Ghz RF deck, which was the two decks you saw above. I didn't necessarily have to do that, but I could and I wanted to keep it running, and the 2.4ghz decks are relatively cheap to come by.. so I figured I'd go for it.