Guy's,

We've figured out what happened - someone turned on (accidentally I hope).

We duplicated the exact scenario.

When you have a radio (JR10X) on and working, and add another radio on the same channel, at a reasonable distance away (to where it won't immediately swamp the original) and slowly bring the 2nd radio closer, once within range, the 1st radio goes into about 1/2 stick of down elevator before going into hold/failsafe. It's probably less than a second of input in the down elevator before holding.

If you do this and the 2nd radio is close by and swamps the signal, it goes into hold/failsafe immediately (without the down elevator).

What I'm imagining is that I flew into the 2nd radio signal somehow, and being so low, coupled with the speed, there was no room to fly out of it, even with the strong signal strength of the JR.

As far as the ebay deal, c'mon, you guys have waaaay too much time to analyze all of this.

So what did I learn out of this? Hmmmm, fly inverted low passes from now on and fly on 2.4!