I know I'm a little late (and you solved your problem already) but I had difficulty using an SS Silver Series ESC that I couldn't get to arm. The problem was that I didn't know there was an arming procedure. Most of my experience has been with eflite stuff that requires moving to 0% throttle. But my particular small SS ESC required an arming procedure where you go to 100% then 0%, then it arms. That was trickky!