XJet

A friend was flying his Seeker 6 receiver today with a Futaba transmitter and said he'd started getting occasional "hits".

He also noted that waving his transmitter antenna around produced some twitching of the servos while the plane was on the ground.

An antenna-down range check revealed that the setup was indeed lacking range -- so we reset the Seeker 6 to his transmitter -- just in case. I noted at this time we needed to actually wind the receiver aerial around the extended transmitter one just to get the receive to lock.

It was then I noticed that the module in the Futaba transmitter was far warmer than it should have been.

I tapped it a couple of times and the servos twiched.

Closer inspection revealed that the pin carrying the RF signal from the module to the antenna on the transmitter had been slightly pushed in and this had fractured the PCB in the transmitter. As a result, the transmitter antenna was effectively disconnected from the module.

We secured the pin to the PCB and soldered a bridge on the copper track.

Everything then range-tested perfectly and was back to normal.

I must say, after many years as a technician in the RF/comms field, I was impressed that the Seeker 6 had as much range as it did in the face of this rather significant transmitter fault.

That the owner of this receiver simply complained of occasional glitches rather than flying out of range and suffering a total loss is good testiment to the sensitivity of the Seeker 6.

Good work Polk.