I just want to say that PCM is Futaba's brand and QCPM is Hitecs Brand. I happen to have a hitec eclipse 7.

Futaba and Hitec have varing characteristics such as speed of transmission relating to refreshing the signals sent and their stategy for which channels to refresh more or less often.

But I agree with everyone here for the most part.


I have my failsafe set on and my throttle set to 25% or less depending on which model/engine, my goal is to have it drop out of the sky but not to quickly and to turn it into a ball coming at you intead of a bullet. I lift up about 3 feet and turn off my radio and see how fast it falls. Scientific hahaha.

The main thing for me is I don't want a runaway heli hurting someone. My Logo 10 could cut small childern in half. My Shogun could make you cry. and the receiver refreshes very quickly if the signal is recovered, so when they talk about losing it and it doing what you have preset it to do - they are talking about more than a second of lost signal and maybe many seconds - a glich for me that is scary is like losing control for 2 or 3 seconds - It happens, but then it just kinda drifts down and yes can hurt itself but if you have lost control with out PCM or Qpcm with fail safe turned on your gonna have a crash too but maybe at a higher power setting. Once you lose your signal and the hover with power on these heli's take off and excelerate very quickly in which ever direction the wind or something decides or continue where you were heading at high speed.

It really is a weird feeling though, your hovering one second and the next your just sliding down and sidways till you hit the ground. And if you have training gear on you hit and start rolling in some direction and you can't stop it. Slow but not slow enough and then power is back and you stop and say gee, glad the power came back on or I would've run into something.

Sometimes I think I should just set the failsafe to throttle off all the way but that's the point we get to decide with fail safe,.

I hope this helped.
Hitec with spectra about $179 on sale, qcpm receiver $100, regular receiver $15 to $46 maybe. And yes you can select either.