I've had a 14MZ for about a year and a half. It does come with the memory card, so purchasing one on your own is not necessary. As far as sending it in every year... I have already had mine in once after almost losing a plane. My 50cc Yak suffered a violent uncommanded roll a bit too low. One second I am at ten feet straight and level scaring the neighbors, the next second it's rolling past 90 degrees quickly. Got it back, pulled up and tried to duplicate and couldn't. I landed and packed up for home. It occurred to me at the time that the 'turbulence' that I had noticed from time to time every once in a while might not be what I thought it was... After talking to a few guys I found out that there was a problem with the encoders on the gimbals. Every now and then the plane would twitch... not just that one, but all of them. But it wasn't frequent, or significant at the time, and I could never duplicate the problem, so I never bothered investigating. Almost cost me a plane. Lesson learned. I sent it back, and they said they replaced the encoders, all the panels on the unit, antenna, screen, gimbals, etc... In fact, the only thing that was the same was the serial number. On my model list the first model listed was a generic model, not the model I had listed first when I sent it in. Did they replace the whole thing and just call it good? Can't say, but I am suspicious. Works great now, and in fact, the planes all feel better 'locked in'. I haven't used it much this year, so I won't send it in this winter, but next year I definitely will. Unless I switch all together by then.

On that point I will say that the radio is amazing... anything you can dream up for it to do, you can get it to do. Once you learn the system it is a breeze... and that learning curve is much improved over the 9Z (which I still have after 15 years). I won't say that it's easy, because that is really subjective, but it is rather intuitive to me.