bluemagic98

After watching the servos dance to the rythem of the flashing lights like they where at some disco party I would tend to say you have hit the nail on the head. If you use dual swithches and batteries why would you need a volt watch? Im moving up to gas powered planes and use dual 2400 li-ion's and regulators it would take 3 days of hard flying to kill this plane.

kestrel53065

I understand that if an antenna wire is crossed over/ touches itself that it can negatively affect its function. Can other wires such as from servos or the voltwatch cause any performance problems if they were close to or touched the antenna?

Flightwatch

My Feedback: (2)

I use Voltwatch to check both packs individually and together, and to check voltage as they run down. One switch goes on, check voltage, then switch off. Turn on the other switch, check voltage, then turn on the second switch. When batteries are fully charged, Voltwatch lights the "max" led. When I excercise the servos, Voltwatch dances a little to show me what I've seen before. If it takes a dip at one position of the transmitter stick, this means a servo gear is stripped: have found at least two bad servos this way. After a few flights, Voltwatch reads near max and I recharge when it reads three LED's down with no servos moving. This arrangement tells me battery status at beginning of flight, and at the end. Voltwatch has always danced to the "effect" of the high current draw from servos but has never made them dance.

I use 6 volt 650 mA NMH packs in .40 size airplanes and a failsafe receiver, not so much to protect the investment, but to protect bystanders from a runaway. The two packs weigh about the same as a single 600 mA nicad pack. Recharge time on the NMH is ~ 30 minutes of flying with digital servos. Voltwatch does it's job.

For antenna location, I had glitches with the antenna near the servo leads. Not everyone has this problem. I think the glitches depend a lot on the receiver used. I had glitches with a Futaba R127 and they went away with an R149. Now using FMA failsafe and no glitches on three different receivers. I still run the antenna away from everything incuding Voltwatch.

Bax

My Feedback: (11)

Even though we have seen no issues with the Hobbico Voltwatch, the email traffic states that some people most certainly do. That can't be denied.

Even though the unit is very inexpensive, we'd most certainly like to see those units that are causing difficulties. We've not seen any here that have problems, but if a problem unit is sent to us, we can see what might be wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give us to help solve this.