David Gladwin

This weekend a friend had his model go into failsafe for about ten seconds using a Futaba 14 MZ Tx with a Weatronic receiver. It was on take off and eventually the model got airborne by itself and control was recovered.

I have carefully examined the SD card from the Weatronics and the RSSI (signal strength) of BOTH receivers dropped to a value of 0.13 (below failsafe level) simultaneously and both later recovered, simultaneously, to the normal level of .55.

My (only) conclusion is that the TX went off the air.

Has anyone had, or know of, a similar experience ?

Regards,

David Gladwin.

Edgar Perez

My Feedback: (13)

David,

What is the failsafe level number for the RSSI? Is that a fixed value?

your friend is a very lucky guy indeed[X(]

Thanks

Ron S

My Feedback: (2)

The fastest I can cycle power on my 14MZ safely, let it warm reboot properly, then tell it to transmit is 12-14 seconds. I wonder if the transmitter has some sort of trailing history, whether it is transmitting or not... Is it possible another strong signal appeared, forcing the relative strength to go to a low value momentarily? Did the failsafe force a turbine shutdown? I hope you find out what happened... Everytime I read something like this, my stomach turns...[]

swissflyer

i think your friend must play the lottery...so lucky are only few..

btw:

what sound very strange, is that possibly, the 14MZ went off..and restarted to transmit..

if was a "reset" when powering on, before she transmit, (on normal operation) you have to confirm that you want to switch on the transmission.
maybe on a problem she restart to transmit by herself..

what will be interesting to know, was the first time (14mz-wea)?? fail safe command to model?? how much distance was beetween pilot and model?

I fly also using WEA and FX40 (tray brother of the 14mz) and in one flight i landed very long..the model was more than 150 meter down the runway and when checkin the nav file i could see that the wea, at such distance, had very small RSSI signal, still no failsafe, but dropped drastically.
May have nothing to do with what happened here..but you never know...

HarryC

My Feedback: (1)

I would love you to explain that in more detail David! If it went into failsafe on the take off run, how did it get airborne by itself? Was it not programmed to idle the engine? Ten seconds is an eternity to lose control, how far away had it got on the ground, and how long out of that time was it airborne before he got control back?

Harry

flyinfool1

My Feedback: (2)

That was my first thought also. If it went into failsafe for about 10 seconds, why did the engine not shut down?

At the distance that the model was away from the TX, what would be a normal RSSI reading if you did actually turn the TX off.

Something else to check is that the antenna connection on the TX is clean. I once had a situation where after a lot of hard use the contact on the bottom of the antenna had gotten dirty and was causing momentary fail safes whenever I wiggled just right while flying.
Could something of this nature have caused the low but not gone RSSI reading?

Evenbigger D

My Feedback: (1)

Don't these tx use microsoft windows?

flyinfool1

My Feedback: (2)

As was explained to me once.
There are 2 processors in th 14.
One for the actual flight control and one for the GUI (Graphic User Interface)
The flight software is Futaba's own.
The audio, video and GUI is a version of Windows CE.

It is possible to crash the GUI and not have any effect on the flight.
This is not true in all cases.

jstok

David,as a long shot it may be worth checking the tx battery,i lost my flash a month ago due to a total failure of the tx pack (non futaba by the way) on examining the cells both were fully charged,but the microchip which the cells were connected to had gone,the model was range checked and was normal,but in the air just did not feel right before going to failsafe with the inevitable result[]