Battery Confusion
 

Did a lot of reading and I am still confused. Tried reading the Battery section but there are too many different types of applications there. All I am interested in is giant scale planes. I am getting back into the hobby after a 2 1/2 year layoff, plane is a good 7 years old. Man has battery technology changed. Got rid of my old NiMH batteries but would like to know what everyone is using. Plane is a 35% Yak with a DA100, DSM2 radio equipment. Figured a simple 2500 mah 6v AA NiMH pack for the ignition would be fine. But what about receiver packs. Mah is not the issue, but battery technology is at least for me. LiPo, Li-ion and so on. Bought some Fromeco A123 packs but not too keen on not being able to check to voltage. What is everyone running in giant scale planes? Bring an old flyer back up to battery speed.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

A123 on the ignition and reciever. If it were me I'd run a 1100 to the ignition and dual 2300's to the reciever.

Don't get caught up in the voltage checking, its something everyone that comes from nickel based batteries has to get past in their brain but let me tell you, its all I run in my big stuff. Fly a flight or two, charge the battery and see how much goes back in. It will tell you how many flights you can get, divide by two for safety sake. They charge so fast and easy at the field, and hold a charge forever.

No regulators, fast charging, no self discharge. Really no downside.

I get mine from www.wrongwayrc.com

Also, if you have one of the older DA ignitions I wouldn't run it on 5 cells, and if you go A123 get a voltage drop down diode. Their newer ignitions will run on higher voltage.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

+1

RE: Battery Confusion
 

+1 sorta... I still run NiMh in my 103" Yak and you can get low self discharge ones at a great price through, where else, Hobby King. If going lithium the A123 or the LiFe packs through HK. Lots of choices now and if you use lower voltage A123 or LiFe and have 6.0 volt servos you don't need a regulator.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

+2 since I'm not sure if "sorta" counts.... lol

Andy is right on target and the DA ignition module will have to be pretty old to not take A123 voltages, DA can tell you which serial numbers are affected if the OP is worried.

The other thing for the OP is that you've inadvertenly stumbled into probabaly the best (IMHO) solution available despite your reservations and while I like Fromeco most of my stuff does come from WrongWay RC these days.... ;)

RE: Battery Confusion
 

Good thing with the Fromeco batteries is that you can order them with the internal balancer. I have one of their ION Cube charges which they don't make any more but it works perfect. Been looking and the new HiTec 4 port charger but it does not charge A123 batteries.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

Sure it does

RE: Battery Confusion
 

Re: Regulators

I learned how problematic regulators can be the hard way.

I put an 8A regulator on my plane to power eight high torque servos and one regular servo.

Everything was fine until I hit the forth or fifth servo connection.

When turning on the plane the servos would freeze or start moving erratically.

Or if everything came up correctly, moving more than a certain number of servos at the same time caused the same behavior... ( no there is absolutely NO binding anywhere... )

It turns out that each servo throws a momentary spike as it powers up and of course while it is in motion. This puts a very fast transient on the line that overtaxes the regulator, exceeding it's capacity for a fraction of a second.

I ended up with two 8A regulators on the plane to eliminate this problem.

Each regulator had IMHO fairly small CAPs, so I assume that's the main reason for the problem.

NiCD's and NiMH batteries suffer no such issues as they can tolerate the momentary high draw with aplomb.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

Or this http://www.electrodynam.com/rc/EDR-207/index.shtml .....I've been using this regularly & it works just fine....FWIW

RE: Battery Confusion
 

I had a long talk with HiTec today and advised them that a hobby shop owner told me that the Hitec x4 would not charge A123 batteries. Mike @ Hitec was nice enough to give me a lesson on batteries which I appriciated. Looks like the charger will charge LiFe which is the same as A123.

I also spoke with Desert Aircraft today about running A123 batteries with their ignition. They told me there was no problem at all because once under a load the batteries are stable at 6.6 volts.

Even an old fart can learn.

RE: Battery Confusion
 

A123 since 2008 on both ignition and rcvr. My 50cc edge uses about 200mah per flight. I fly 8 times and put about 1600mah back in the pack. This has not changed in almost 400 flights on this one airplane. Love my A123s.