There are a lot of trade offs when designing a receiver. In general, it is a good idea to limit the bandwidth at the front-end. Typically, with less bandwidth you can put more gain at the beginning of the receiver and reduce the noise floor. I'm just guessing that you will get a little better performance on the Futaba receivers when you are at the very limits of the range. The fact that the FCC mandates 50 interfering signals 20 kHz apart (The other transmitters at your field) complicates the normal noise issues.

Apparently, Futaba engineers decided it was better to divide the 72 MHz band into two parts. If you use a low band receiver with a high band crystal, the receiver will not have the designed total gain. It will work on the bench, but you risk losing it when the plane is a 1/2 mile away. If you happen to take-off with your transmitter antenna in the retracted position, you may lose it right at the end of the runway.

I know a lot of people use the Hitec receivers in Combat events. It seems a combat event, with lots of people flying simultaneously, is a nice real-world test of receiver noise rejection. So I'm not convince the Futaba approach is worth the hassle of only being able to use half the alloted 72MHz frequencies with any given receiver.

Carl