Boy am I glad I was checking RCU before I left to go fly! Mike's post appeared as I was typing a response to Rick. This is great information since I don't know much about 2.4 giggle hurts.

When something goes wrong you start to second guess everything. The placement of the forward antenna was one I asked myself. You state "the signals end up bouncing back and forth off of surrounding metal objects." Another eureka moment. This may explain why the aileron channels went bonkers but the receiver never went to the 20% signal loss fail safe. I plan to mount the receiver just as you suggest with one antenna going aft and the other going down but away from the horizontal antenna at 90 deg. There is a piece of foam under the receiver in the picture, it's just hard to see. This was the first time I didn't wrap the receiver completely with foam.

The battery was all the way forward on top of the fuel tank for balance and I took the foam wrap off of it to have it fit better. Maybe another mistake compounding the problem. The 4.5 volt level was not reached until the battery was intentionally overloaded with the tester. All other loads were 4.8 - 4.65v.

Having RCU buddies to turn to is great! As with all machines sometimes the cause of failure has several different sources and you guys have really opened my eyes to several potential threats.

Many thanks Mike

Steve