UNCERTAINTY (the fear of the unknown). Honestly there is nothing worse than having uncertainty, or a lack of confidence when it relates to your RF signal. Regardless of what we fly we should ALL have a professional obligation to ensure our equipment maintains the highest level of safety and redundancy, irrespective of the cost.

I may have mentioned this before but the region where I fly is incredibly polluted, in fact it’s possibly the most polluted RF airspace on the planet. We are surrounded by a combination of Microwave Towers, HV Power Lines, Military activity (adjacent to an Air Base), RC shops on the Club Airfield (with Wi-Fi boosters), AND a Drone School (with a lot of telemetry systems using 2.4Ghz).

Now let’s add another factor. There are a few who lack common sense and are totally oblivious to RC Safety, Rules and Regulations, and common etiquette that most clubs adopt (which are “sort of” in place over here but are often neglected). To elaborate, you are flying one of your $25K competition models when suddenly a “no name brand unregulated drone” will appear and hover 1 meter behind your head as the guy wants to film your gimbals inputs, or he will try to chase your jet down the runway during a flyby - and believe it or not they actually had to shut down the International Airport recently (for an hour with several diversions), because a drone guy thought it would be nice to stand under the approach path, climb his drone up to 500’ and see what an airliner would look like head on.

Anyway the point of all this is that our good old faithful, tried and trusted RC Transmitters and Receivers are being put through their paces (over here and by default), and unfortunately some are NOT performing well anymore. It’s not that they were manufactured wrong, on the contrary, my original JR PCM 10s (from MacGregor Industries 1994) was simply a marvel and way ahead of its time. It’s just that the unregulated system (over here) has evolved to such an extent that the equipment simply can’t cope anymore and has become the weakest link in the chain. Even with modern Power Supply SRS units we can still see the poor RF quality from the receivers. Unfortunately this has caused a lot of unexplained LOSS OF CONTROL accidents and I know, some will blame the equipment over poor judgement and flying ability, but even if that’s as high as 50%, we still have had an unprecedented amount of signal failures over the past couple of years.

Now please don’t take offense, I have the utmost respect for my fellow RC colleagues (YOU), but perhaps some of you may have been a little spoiled, meaning: You live in a first world country where everything RC is regulated and licensed, you have the best RC facilities and equipment at your fingertips, you have wonderful clubs and committee’s (which ensure the behavior mentioned above should NEVER happen), and your RF atmosphere is clean and NOT polluted. This means that your current RC equipment “may” work just fine for the next five to ten years. My good friends (David Gladwin, Olivier Nicholas, and Dave Wilshire), have for years been using some RC equipment that was simply way ahead of its time and is perhaps still considered exceptional today (namely Weatronic), but unfortunately that system is currently in limbo and so my conscience and circumstance lead me to seek alternative and more modern equipment with the next decade in mind.

We all know that 2.4GHz is NOT perfect and can reach saturation on some frequencies within the spectrum, so it was for this reason that I was drawn to the ingenious design of the JETI DC-24 with its 900MHz redundancy. Should any of you ever feel any uncertainty or lack of confidence in your current RF equipment, and want something “Bullet Proof”, then please do yourself a favor and do some research, honestly you won’t be disappointed in JETI. I have been using this system for a little over six months now and despite what you may read the RF quality is exceptionally clean on 2.4GHz. Having been in the hobby for 45 years I can now comfortably restore some much needed confidence in my current RC fleet (a $300K investment).

Darryl Tarr
(BVM Field Rep)

The information above is NOT for personal gain but rather in response to dozens of questions from fellow RC enthusiasts, and PLEASE, let’s NOT start another brand war.