Guys , I am at my wits end, I have been in this hobby for longer then I care to remember, BNC ( before NIcads) I have built many battery packs with no problems but over the last years, I have purchased several new radios, Hitec, AIrtronics and none of the batteries will hold a charge, I have cycled them, tested them but if I leave them for a week they are dead,they show full voltage but it only seems to be a surface charge and die before your eyes, I have older Airtonics and Futaba radiios that I can leave for weeks without charging, I am slowly converting the new ones to NMH batteries, my question for you, is the quality of Nicads dropping ??? Mike

I have never heard this before. Have you checked so that your equipment doesn't draw when it should be offline?

Yes I have checked, It has been happening to my VG600 and VG400 Airtronics, picture this, I only live 100 meters from my flying strip, I fire up the plane at the house, taxi up the road to the field and by now the Tx batteries are in the red !!! I suspected a bad cell so I use "old Tech" and hooked up the old standby car tail light bulb and monitored each cell, the all went down at the same rate, it beats me !!!! Mike

Very odd. R/C nicad quality has never been better.

(1) What do you use for a charger? Do you have access to a battery maintenance system (cycler/conditioner)?

(2) How long do you charge? C/10 takes 14-16 hours.

(3) Have you ever put an ammeter is series with a charge lead to see what the charge current REALLY is? Should be about 45-65mA for a typical Tx pack.

(4) Are there any signs that a cell has vented? That would indicate overcurrent conditions had occurred at some point. Only cure is to replace the pack.

(5) How old are your Tx battery packs? Age can be an issue even on seldomly used packs. Careful maintenance will help packs last longer.

(6) Have you ever left the packs on the charger for extended periods of time? Even with a slow rate charger (C/10), this is bad. Such practice can causes internal metal migration issues over the long term.

(7) How many discharges have the packs seen? The typical life count is around 1000. Can be more or less, depending on care and feeding, as well as luck.

Thank you for the info
OK we are talking , new out the box radios, all suffer from the same problem, the batteries will not hold charge if left for a week, I use an ACe Digipace, I suspected it so I ran one of my "good" packs through and it worked fine, the lastest defective batteries are in a JR XF631, the Tx battery is good for two flights, on a hunch we also checked the Rx battery and it was in the red,
I am familair with the NMH batteries and so far have not a single failure, up to 4 times the capacity, Time will tell if they stand up ion the long run, MIke

How do you build your NiCd packs ? Do you solder them ? Any possibility of overheating while doing this ?

If they are new radios then exchange the bad packs under the mfg's warranty program. Even if you are no longer interested in using NiCD's perhaps your flying buddies will want them. Or better yet, sell the new replacements to help finance your NiMH upgrades.

Yes I do make up my own and have better success than the comercial ones,
What I do with the rejects is pull them down and save the good ones and make up packs and give them to some of the kids that are trying to get into our great hobby
I proved out tonight that it was the packs, I had made up new NMH packs, the Tx had dropped .5 volts after 3 long flights and the Rx was still right up there Mike

Multimike, I'm not sure about nimh, but you should not let nicd packs go below 1.05V/cell or you risk cell reversal