When the Detroit club did some testing (in a borrowed school gym - nice and level, and no sunlight) last winter, we found that the style of baffling that Phil @ rctankwars was putting on his newer DBU's tended to limit the effective range that the DBU could be hit from. Our club standard was agreed as being able to take a hit at the same range as your tank could shoot (~70ft for the IR LED's Phil supplies). Phil's current design was not able to do that on all sides with the 2 examples we tested - where the dozen or so examples of his original style (which Phil kept making specially for me ) with wider baffles and bigger windows for the sensors were able to be hit reliably by a Tamiya tank at 80ft and a DBCRC2 at 60ft on all sides. On the down side I do tend to get shot up rather easily at close range with these... [&o]

So I believe both YHR and Panther G are correct: the DBU can certainly be more sensitive than the TBU, but by trying to make the DBU behave like a TBU at a certain range and/or angle it is very difficult to do so without making it less sensitive in other situations.

I also tried the HBU with a DBU sensor inside, the problem I found was that it very sensitive to the positioning of the sensor under the prism. Get it a little off center and we found it will bias the sensitivity to one side at the expense of the others. We also found when you did find the side that was most sensitive, it was good for 40ft but wouldn't take a hit at 60ft. I suspect as somebody pointed out, this may well be due to the HBU prism being as 'rough as a Badgers bottom'...

The solution I am currently testing is a TBU mounted on a 9pin sub D connector and plugged direct into Phil's DBU socket - you can wire the TBU socket direct to the DBC board, but as I have a lot of DBC/RC2 equipped tank's already this seemed like a better idea [8D].
The pin out is the same order as the socket Phil supplies, just make sure you get it the right way around [X(] The 5V feed for the IR sensor is on the left in the pic, the +ve connection for the LED on the right. Also be sure to leave enough of the pins on there so that you can push the socket over to a more central location, otherwise you'll struggle to plug it into a Panzer III/IV cupola [:@].

So far it seems to work, but I have had both of the DBCRC2 tanks I tested with it glitch on me after a while. In my experience the DBCRC2 tends to be sensitive to dry joints and bad connections, and I heard from Tankhobby that the TBU is also somewhat noisy electrically - so this could be the problem. I also have only one TBU converted, so there might be some thing out of spec here, altho it did work without problems in a DBC equipped tank? Does anyone else here have any experience of this?

I'll do some more testing in a couple of weeks hopefully and update if I find anything new [8D]

HTH,
Mart