RE: Required voltage
Hi Larry, how are you? It`s getting cooler here in Japan.
I made a glider with about a 2foot wingspan with a hs80 and a futaba micro servo, running off 3 nicad 110mah cells. I had many good flights, but on one ocassion the servos froze midflight and it went in at speed. After I repaired it I found that the problem was the battery getting low, and the hs80 drawing too much current, which pulled the battery voltage down enough to make the recevier (a futaba twochannel) blackout. After that I put in another cell to raise the pack voltage to stop it happening.
In my limited experience from the gear I own, my futaba and JR servos have a much lower peak current than my hitech and cirrus ones. I test this quite crudely by plugging in a near flat battery pack in the REC and an onboard voltage meter. Then I plug in and try different servos- I stall them and look at the voltage meter. With a hs80 it will pull my near flat 270mah nicad pack right into the red/ beyond.
With my futaba (same size as the hs80..s3203?? i forget) or JR 9gm servos the voltage drops very much less- Listening to the different servo sounds the cirrus tiny 5.4g servos and the hs80`s make a very high pitched sound that makes me suspect that the motors are somewhat 'hot and high revving' for the voltage they are run at and that is why they pull down the battery voltage at stall.
The JR / Futaba servos on the other hand sound lazy.
If it was me I`d probably just try what rec`s you have on a 3.6v NiMH pack and be carefull about which servos you use- you don`t want the blackout effect happening of course but I don`t think you will if you don`t use a 'hot' servo.
That way you don`t have to spend big $$ on a battery pack or charger. I got my my 2/3AAA cells from the battery station for $1 each!
I flew my 1 channel 020 powered plane o.o.s with no problems off 3.6 volts and a futaba rec and servo so I can`t see that it could be a problem.
Stefan