do you need a certain kind of radio to power the magnetic actuators, or could you use any kind of radio for them?

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by a magnetic actuator. What are they actuating, and why?

look here http://www.slowfly.com/category.chtml?category=%2312192 the little round coils are magnetic acuators. when you build small airplanes, servos are too heavy, and they use these things in replacement of the servos, because they are so much lighter, but i am not sure if i need a certain radio to function these things.

heres a direct link to one of them http://www.slowfly.com/cgi-bin/shop....view=%23100566

The short answer is: you can't use any current crop of commercial crop of receivers with them. All the receiver and interface electronics are custom made to a specific application.

The coil's magnetic moment, as you may already know, depends on number of turns of wire, current flow, and cross section area of the coil. So amount of deflection is controlled by DC current flowing through the coil. You will need to build the interface circuitry between the receiver and actuators to translate the receiver signals to a DC current proportional to the stick movements, should you choose to use a commercial receiver.

There has been lots of talks on microflight circle to convert the electronics of those Microsizer cars to a
flying model, as those cars actually use actuators for controls, but are are lots of pitfalls. Most guys I know of who are into this kind of stuffs tend to have pretty extensive formal technical backgrounds; it's out of the leagues of most average RC modelers.

One of my projects for the next winter (or two, or three) is to build a flying insect, sort of a rc version of a rubber powered insect flying machine Paul McCready built quite a few years ago.

I read through the slowfly.com website. As far as I can tell, you need a special receiver to actuate them. And you cannot hook up a servo to the special receiver. If you are looking at getting the actuators from them, I would just go ahead and get their receiver.

If you need more information, I suggest you post in the Electrics forum.