RE: Edge 540 2nd flight almost last
Hi Bill, as my father in law (rlmncii) mentioned in the previous post, I had a problem that sounds strikingly familiar to your problem. The setup I was running was a Hangar 9 Ultra Stik 60 with an OS 60, 6 Hitec 5645MGs (control surfaces), 1 standard servo (throttle), Hydrimax 1650 mah 6 V receiver batt, Futaba R148 PCM receiver (with no fail safe set up). I had many flights on the stik before I first noticed the problem. The first time I was at a farm field in the country with no other flying fields around. We did the typical range check, actually to ~200 ft. I flew 2 flights with no problems what-so-ever. On the third attempt I was on the runway just about to throttle up when the left aileron parked itself at full up deflection and the servo was making a kind of jittery noise. I obviously decided to call it a day and investigate the problem. When I turned the rx and tx off and back on the problem went away. Needless to say I was baffled. I had created some of my own extensions for the servos, so naturally I thought I screwed something up. I checked, and triple checked every solder point and every connection with no problems. I did end up replacing a couple of questionable extensions and thought the problem was fixed. I went to my local flying field some time later and checked out with a range check and everything seemed good, so I flew 2 or 3 times. On my last flight I was just messing around with some aerobatics when the plane went into a violent right roll coming out of a botched loop. I had plenty of altitude to figure out what was wrong, so I recovered to level flight holding full left aileron to keep the airplane flat and level. I immediately brought the plane around for a downwind approach and thankfully was able to recover the plane with no damage. When i got to the airplane this time the right aileron was parked up! I was even more confused. So, I turned off the rx and tx and once again the problem went away. I trouble shot the whole system again and made sure every connection was secure, everything was fine. I didn't fly again for a while, but the next time I flew I did another range check at the local field and everything was fine. I didn't know how to get the problem to surface except to fly and I felt confident that if it happened again I could land safely like I did before. I flew 2 or 3 more times and on my last approach I was flat and level and just bringing back the throttle when, bam, it rolled HARD left about 15~20 ft off the ground. I was right on top of it, but this time I didn't have enough altitude to recover, so I went in nose first, but almost leveled out before impact. The firewall tore loose and the throttle servo jammed, but otherwise i was surprised to see the plane in tact.
I never thought much of the problem because I could never trace out the problem in the electronics on the bench. That is until I read this thread and saw two other cases that sounded very similar. So, after thinking about what happened to the stik and trying to trouble shoot all of the things I could think of, it sounds like it was either two bad hitec 5645s, the rx went bad, or my tx is off frequency like rlmcnii mentioned. I am going to be sending in my tx for a !QUOT!tune up!QUOT! shortly. I will let you know if I have any other problems after I get it back. Although, if it makes any difference, I have never had a single problem when using FMA receivers. I have about 5 or 6 of them and rlmcnii has about 3 or 4. Good luck figuring out what happened, and I am sorry that you had to find out about that by getting your brand new edge banged up.
~Rich