My neighbor and I started flying at christmas and we still haven't been able to fly together. Were both flying feather receivers from Hitec and were wondering if this is common with single conversion rx's.

Don't mean to sound stupid here but are you on different channels? More info would be helpful.

Single conversion RX's can have trouble if someone is on just the right frequency, or if you have two other transmitters running with the right frequencies. It's called 2nd order intermodulation and 3rd order intermodulation. I forget the details of it, but it can cause some funky things to happen, and it's why I fly all duel conversion stuff. (except my new GWS park flyer, but that's different). I did have the GWS at the field yesterday, and when the TX is off, the GWS finds all kinds of reasons to get jittery when my duel conversion RXs usually stay quiet. Of course, it's bad practice to turn off the TX first, especially with an electric airplane.

And yeah, like Stick Jammer said, more info would be good. What channel are you on, what channel is your friend on, and were there other people operating at the same time, on what channels?

Some Tx's are a bit "wide" or somtimes tuned a little off of the center frequency, so it's possible to have two TXs on adjacent channels that get a little too close for some RX's to handle.

i'm on 41 and he's on 18. Even if we stand 50 feet apart there's still interference. No one else was flying.

The Feather receivers are particularly prone to interference.

Here's a good article on how two transmitters can interact to create interference on other channels. It's possible that you have a transmitter in the area you don't know about, such as a commerical transmitter on 72Mhz. The FCC allows some commerical uses "between" our RC channels. At my field, we have some unuseable channels because there are commerical transmitters that are close to the field and they blanket the RC channel on either side. (if we were father away, it wouldn't be an issue).

http://www.greathobbies.com/document/tech_radio_1.html

Reading farther down that artile I just posted, there is a bit of "magic" that occurs when any two transmitters are exactly 23 channels apart that can take out every single conversion RX in the air, or at least the ones that aren't built to handle it.

18 + 23 = 41 = you're toasty. One of you is going to have to change channels, or you're going to have to get duel conversion RX's

btw, that article was written in 1992. Some of the info about how important it is to "tune" RXs is less true now, many RXs have much better interference rejection than they used to, so changing channels on RXs isn't as big a deal as it used to be.