Guys,

The battle between JR and Futaba has raged for years. Think of them as Intel and AMD. JR has always been innovative and Futaba steady in their development pace. My first JR radio was from Circus Hobbies. A Galaxy. Miles ahead at the time. If anyone remembers the radio back then. I still have it and it still works great. Just don't use a Galaxy receiver in the crouded electrical environment today. I'm sure that when JR is ready, their new product will blow people away. They're just not going to let the cat out of the bag before it's ready, and fully tested! I switched from Futaba in 1980. I just got tired of the same old thing from them back then.
I've read up on the spread spectrum for aircraft and there are a lot of issues to resolve before we see one for aircraft. If the spectrum is in the 72mhz band, what frequency will the spectrum switch to. The band widths and the selectivity are already very tight. There just isn't much room in our bandwidth to go bouncing the frequencies around. We have a lot of other things on very close adjacent channels to us. Since the ground frequencies don't have the range we do, the interference isn't a problem for spread spectrum. The signal just doesn't travel that far. The only solution I can see is for a digitized coded signal that you program yourself. Keeloq technology (car alarms etc.) is the only thing I can see happening in the future...But we are still going to be bound by the parameters of the base frequency. Either way, give the guys at JR a break...I think they've done a great job in accomplishing what they have so far. I'm sure we won't be dissapointed in the future.

Dan Gill
Details 4 Scale