Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Hangar: Episode 6 – R/C Radios”.
Hello and welcome to maker hanger my name’s Lucas weekly and today, we’re gon na be talking about radios for RC planes, we’ll get into the different channels, the frequencies and also some basic programming. So, let’s get started, all basic radios will have at least four channels the throttle, the elevator, the aileron and the rudder channels. Anything after that are accessories, such as a gear switch, a flap switch, and there are a couple other ones on a sixth channel radio. There’S the four basic channels, then the gear switches on the top, the flap switch, which is on the front and then all the other switches are for the mixes. The dual rates and a trainer switch the gear and the flaps switches don’t have to be used for the landing gear in the flaps. They can be used for other things, such as a bomb dropper or maybe even air brakes.
It’S up to you to decide what to use these, for the trainer switch goes with the plug on the back of the radio. A flight instructor can plug in another radio into this port and then use your radio to take off the plane. The instructor can hold down the switch, giving you control and then he can take back control whenever something’s gon na happen to the plane.
Basic helicopters and planes can use a radio with three channels. Planes only really need three channels to fly, but six channel radios are the most common. Then you have radios, they go up to 9, 10, 11 and 12 channels and those are very expensive radios for very expensive planes that do a lot of things. Radio is operate on different frequencies and the most common and fairly new one is 2.4 gigahertz. They have a short black antenna and 2.4 gigahertz is pretty much in every radio on the market. Today, previously, the most common frequency was 72 megahertz.
These have the long extendable antennas. You might still see them on your RC flying field, with some of the older models they’ve been known to glitch out and 2.4. Gigahertz is definitely an improvement on this, because it’s more reliable and more people can fly. At the same time, with it, unlike 72 megahertz, everyone had to have their own sub frequency, and if someone had the same frequency, then you couldn’t fly with them. The radio included in the parts list is called the orange t6 and it’s very easy to program, because it’s much like some of the more expensive radios on the market, even though it is only 60 dollars. This is what I’m going to be programming on in this series.
Other radios will have different programs, so be sure to check your manual. However, the topics I’ll be covering will stay the same throughout different brands of radios. The first thing radios can do is dual rates. This is having multiple settings for the distance of movement for your control surfaces. Another function radios can do is called Expo or exponential control. This is kind of like dual rates, only with still maintaining the full movement of the stick. Let me explain: setting your Expo turned your stick into an exponential graph, so I have Expo set to a hundred percent or a plus a hundred on my elevator. So, as you see when I slowly pull up nothing’s happening and then, as I come toward the end of the stick, it goes to its full extent.
So this is a really extreme example of expo now fifty percent said it is actually a good thing to have. It gives you pretty much full control but towards the middle of a stick. If you have jittery hands when you’re first flying, then they’ll prevent your plane from jumping around and that’s what I pretty much use it for and also it gives you a little bit more level of control towards the center of the stick. And then, when you get to the outside, you still have full control.
So that’s what I use it for it is pretty helpful I’ll. Show you how to program these in more depth when we start setting up the radio for the plane that we’re going to build something else, radios can do is called mixes. These mixed together controls – and we won’t really be going over these because you won’t need them as a beginner and they’re pretty much only used in advanced planes. There are a bunch of other things that you can do with these radios, and one of them is flaperons.
So this is a mix of an Lorenz and flaps V. Tail mixing combines the elevator and the rudder to make a tail that looks like a V Delta mixing mixes the Ella run and elevator channels together for planes that don’t have tails. If there’s a series to of maker hanger we’ll definitely cover these but they’re, not very important when you’re just starting off well, the transmitter doesn’t do any good if it can’t talk to the plane and that’s the job of the receiver and we’ll talk about those.
Next time, thanks for watching .