ORIGINAL: RCKen
And for the killer! The PCM lockout. When the PCM rx gets too many bad packets it then goes into a lockout or failsafe position. This continues for several refresh cycles after a valid packet is received. Most are around 1 second long before control is returned. It is this lockout that has most heli fliers staying with PPM! imagine hovering and having the system lock out for a second. A glitch can be just as bad, but at least then the control is instantly returned and not held up for a second or so
Don't believe everything you read on the web my friend.
This may have been true for first generation systems but hasn't been the case for many years and is very easy to prove. Take two radios on the same frequncy one ppm, the other pcm. Use the ppm to flood the pcm RX into lockout, turn this ppm radio off while continuing to twitch the sticks on the pcm to determine when control is returned. I dare you to measure the delay, it's a frame or two, nowhere near as slow as the response time of the human nervous system....
Further, failsafe (what is incorrectly referred to as lockout) will only occur after an extended period of garbled frames, on some radios this time period is programmable, for most it's 30ms.
Another fact is PCM's resistance to noise. The simple fact is a PCM radio will remain unaffected in a noisy environment that has long ago sent any PPM radio into the ground with zero control. The old fable about "flying through" interference couldn't be more false. Any interference a PPM unit could "fly through" would be flown through with control by a PCM radio.
It's not lockout (sic) that causes crashes, it's interference.
In a shoot down, I'd rather have my aircraft fly a power-off predictable path to the ground than have it twitching about overhead with roaring at full throttle. How about you?[sm=72_72.gif]