ORIGINAL: Rodney
If your Voltwatch (or clone of it) is dropping into the red when you cycle the sticks with a fully charged battery, you DO have a potential problem, not just a MAYBE. That means that for a few microseconds or more, the voltage at the point the Voltwatch is plugged into fell to a low value. If you are using a 2.4GHz system, this may be putting you in danger of a brown out condition. There can be several reasons for this, some of which are: Switch with high impedance contacts caused by wear, corrosion or contact size: a battery with a high internal impedance due to under capacity, age or ???; to small a gage wire between the battery and receiver or a defect causing a loss in cross sectional area of the wire somewhere along it's length; a binding servo; a servo being stalled at extreme position. If you are dropping into the red zone, I'd sure recommend that you find the cause if you value your plane. Properly used and evaluated, the Voltwatch is an excellent trouble shooting tool.
I agree with every bit of this except for one thing (and we had a thread on this before). In my mind, the jury isn't out yet on the brown-out comment. The Voltwatch/Voltmagic devices are great...I use them on everything. However, they are very sensitive in voltage measurement and they have a very high sample rate. As a result, they see voltage fluctuations that the receiver does not detect which adds to their early warning value in my mind.
But I'm just not sure how long a voltage dip needs to exist before the receiver sees it and browns out. I can't remember but someone here had the ability to measure this and was going to do some testing. To make matters worse, I'm sure various receivers have different parameters for brownout.
I think it is voltage AND duration that cause the brown out. No?
Tom