I think Specturm grabs most of the new market like they did for me by offering cheap bind and fly park zone modles with DX6's This was my first plane and raido 4 years ago when I started. As time when on, I got into bigger modles and needed more channels, so I got a DX8, a huge step up, loved it, the next year I was flying turbin Jets and need more channels, and already owning 12 planes with Spectrum recivers my choses were stay spectrum, go Jr or Sell everything and go Futaba like some of my flying bros.
As I have never had a single issues in my short 3 years of flying with Spectrum, I never felt the need to jump brands, and the DX18 offered all the channels I could ever want at a price of $700 that I could aford.
Im a little burned that the New DX18 can talk, I wish mine could, but Im just happy to see that they are still comeing up with new ideals at a resonable price.
The biggest turn off for me on the futaba was the channels. 14 is nice but I got 3 modles that Im useing 15-16 channels, A sweet Skymaster F15, Huge ESM B25 with a lot of cool functions, and now a Velox XL with a huge Turbine and smoke.