Orcrest,

Are you sure you had a dozen charges or cycles on your batteries?I’ve witnessed several times where new batteries in the NiCd and NiMH flavor do not like to take an initial charge with the wall chargers or give a false sense of the cells being charged, either by the cell or in a pack.Typically the cells like to be “woken up” from their virgin-factory state and cycled a few times starting with low .1 amp trickle then gradually working your way up to a more aggressive charge rate. Believe it or not, but even the common advertised .15 - .4 amps wall charger may be too strong for a packs initial charge. And these wall chargers are cheaply made and voltages and currents will and dovary.Regardless, after several cycles the cells should take near their rated current.And regardless of what current you used to charge the cells, within reason, the cells will show the charge voltage when taken off the charger, regardless the charged state someone may believe by seeing that the pack is at a specific voltage may mean that they are charged, but in fact they may not be.Unless you’re using a computer charger you can never know with any reasonable certainty how much current the cells actually absorbed. And the Envelope chemistry is not the same as what came with the radio.Actually all batteries even in the same chemistry of functionality have their specific-"secret" formula, etc. They may work with the wall charger, but the wall charger that came with the radio was specifically designed to work with the batteries that came with the unit.

It amazes me that several of us in this hobby spend hundreds and thousands on all their radio, planes, etc..but they’ll trust this investment with a wall charger.There’s no way I’d trust any of my equipment in the air on a new battery or a battery that has more than a month on it unless I’ve cycled it on a computerized battery charger that you can probably pick up for $60 on the low end.

Hitec put the wall charger in the box to make the kit functional as a bare bones starting point.I don’t blame them for putting low capacity batteries in the kit, either.I am certain that they are “Quality” batteries that will get you thru enough flights. And I certainly don’t wont to absorb a cost in buying the radio if they offered a higher quality battery because I’ll be switching the batteries to my battery of choice, anyhow.They did, however, do a wonderful and unprecedented job with the flexibility that the user can pick his voltage or cells in his transmitter or receivers. The only real improvement they could have done is offered a charged jack bypass from the radio protection circuit so that we can cycle our batteries through the charge port.But isn’t that getting picky?I want to believe thought, that Mike and others read this thread and will take all these wants and desires into the next design. This Radio is just totally revolutionary to this hobby.

Great news from Mike today with hisQ/C in process.I have three planes gutted and waiting their Hitec transplants since Nov.I’ve had a few chances to go out flying with sunny conditions, reasonable temperatures and no wind.However I refuse to fly with my Futaba gear now.