Recently, I've been getting my RX battery packs from the LHS. He has the Venim 5 cell 1200 mah packs for about $21.00 which I consider reasonable. I have at least a couple of spares around and fully charged after I experienced a failure of an on-board battery pack a few months ago. Fortunately, this particular plane had a pair of RX batteries on separate switches and into separate RX channels. It failed in flight because it checked out OK prior to the flight but after the flight, it read very low, just over 1 volt. I was lucky to have a pair of batteries.. this, without a doubt, saved my Venus II.

This is, by the way, when I decided that voltwatch was the way to go. I found the problem when I shut down the RX. I turned off the battery pack 1 and saw the voltwatch go right to RED.. the second switch was still on. I cycled both switches, but when switch 2 (battery 2) was on, the voltwatch was in the red. With both on, it was in the green.. the second LED was lit. I removed the battery pack and put a new pack in the plane, checked it, and it was fine. I then re-charged both to bring them both up to equal charge and continued flying.

We took the battery pack apart and found a dead cell. Bad bad. This pack was about a year and a half old, by the way.

CGr.