ORIGINAL: RCKen

Dick and Gene,
While the need for having ample power is always a concern, the brownout issues that plagued early JR/Spektrum systems are pretty much a thing of the past. The problem was that if the receiver voltage dropped below a set level (3.8v if I remember correctly) the receiver would actually ''reboot''. The reboot on those older receivers took 3-5 seconds and of course that amount of time is an eternity in an RC airplane and would usually result in a crash. Since they have have re-engineered the software so that a reboot now takes less than a second. So if you do get a brownout chances are that you will get control back before the plane crashes.

Like I said, you always want to make sure that you have plenty of juice for the radio on the plane. I just wanted to make sure that the info got out that it's not as big of an issue as it used to be. Other manufacturers have different cutoff voltages for their receivers. I don't know what it is for Futaba, but I know that Airtronics 2.4 systems have a cutoff voltage of 1.8v before the receiver shuts down.

Hope this helps

ken