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Five of our members were on the Circuit this weekend. Nigel, David and Vernon went to the IOMs at Poole and Rohan with Graham went off to the RG65 at Bournville.
Rohan did great – with a 4th on a Saturday in a big-name fleet and got 3rd on Sunday ahead of Dorian !! Rohan reports the Snickers Chocolate bar was good!
Down in Poole it was slightly blowy, but David sailed an absolute stormer finishing 2nd overall !! (David in a V12 I think.) Great to see David doing so well. Nigel grabbed a 5th which ain’t half bad when you look at who was sailing !!
When you recharge your AAs and pop them in your transmitter, what voltage do you see?? I’m getting 5.4v… I’m sure it used to be more. Do you get similar?
I was on the verge of simply buying a large box of AA batteries from the super market and burning my way through them – throwing the old ones away, except it’s not allowed of course. I popped in a set of brand new Energiser AAs straight from Waitrose and the transmitter said 5.6v….
For a long while I’ve used the “smart charger” that came with my battery set from Amazon. I’ve got to thinking the charger is not “smart” at all. It just has a symbol that blinks and eventually stays lit when it claims the battery is full. Not very intelligent or smart. I suspect it also does not stop charging at that point…
I got to wondering what my favourite LIPO/LIFE charger manufacturer (SKYRC) would make of all this. I’m proper pleased with my LiFe/LiPo charger – a SkyRC T100. To my delight, they make a AA/AAA series of intelligent chargers. You can pay seriously mad money for units that will manage charging of 8 batteries and upwards… 8 at a time would be nice. However, I set a budget ceiling and went for a 4 cell unit.
It manages each battery independently, and you can adjust current, voltage target and a few other things. Critically when it reaches the voltage target, it goes into standby mode – I really wanted that (safety).
If you are inclined, you can manage it from your phone (app).
The only pain is that a PD power unit (whatever that might be) is extra – not sure why but that added another £17 on top.
The transmitter is up to 5.9v after one attempt.
It’ll also re-condition batteries and trickle charge if you want. Great.
I was looking today for more information as to how low Receiver Batteries should be allowed to go before pulling the boat out for a fresh battery. The numbers above are per cell, so as most of our batteries are 2 cell, just double the above numbers.
This was a super explanation and you can read it in full here
Datchet Radio Sailing - Making It All Much Easier !! 