Category Archives: Radio Equipment

Beginners Guide to Diagnosing Under-Deck Problems – Electrical/Radio/Winch/Servo….!!

I had a little outage last Marblehead Sunday. The boat slipped into Failsafe mode and drifted quietly off toward the Royal Castle of Windsor!!

The Commodore leapt into RIB duty mode and helped me get it back, no problem! Useful to take a lifter with you! As soon as racing finished, in classic Datchet manner… everyone gathered around, tool boxes came out, to get my fault diagnosed.

It was pretty educational and a great learning to see them go about it. We quite quickly figured all the electrics and radio were OK and identified the winch as a possible failure point. It was great to see them checking out the transmitter, receiver, battery, cabling etc.

All this learning was a delight. So as not to lose it, I have documented the diagnostic and repair process here. If you find yourself in a similar position, it may be helpful. Click below to download.

Click to access sailing-pdf-version-v2-diagnosing-under-deck-problems-jul-2024.pdf

Spektrum Tittle Tattle….!!

So that we could write our Datchet radio sailing manuals for all the Transmitter Brands, I went ahead and sorted out trying them all.

In asking around, you get positive and negative opinions (passionate usually!) about all of them. When asking around about experience with Spektrum, more than once I was told that the kit had to be abandoned due to boats falling out of range. This was naturally accompanied by the views of others saying “used them for years, never had a single problem”…. (more passion!)

Of course, a boat can drop signal for all sorts of reasons – transmitter, receiver, carbon fibre, battery etc, but when your much respected friends say they had a problem you pay attention, don’t you? It might be the transmitter, it might not.

So I went ahead and bought a new Spektrum DX8e (on special offer, I might add!!). Before even hooking it up, I managed to break the thing – entirely my fault, by the way. So RW took it off to see the Spektrum doctor for me.

What was interesting was that RWs Model Shop (AL’s Hobbies) knew straight away after repair to give it a range check. I’m thinking they knew what to look for. They promptly sent it back to the distributor. It only took a couple of days to turn around.

The diagnosis was a faulty battery connector which had to be replaced. It was all so quick I’m thinking they had seen all this before a few times – a big batch problem maybe.

Anyway, if you have set aside your Spektrum after losing contact, it may all be to do with a suspect battery connector. You might want to get that looked at.

I’m grateful to Gary at AL’s Hobbies for sorting mine out 🙂

Using “Program Mixing” or “Power Mixing” on Futaba T6K….!!

A few days ago, we published a piece on a relatively advanced idea of using the Program Mixer function (also known as “Channel Mixers” and “Power Mixers”) and on the Futaba menu it is shown as “P.MIX”.

We have a feeling that maybe only recent Futaba T6K transmitters have P.MIX software built in. My own transmitter is a T6K Version 3. It has P.MIX. The manual that came with the transmitter in 2023 turns out to be a manual for Version 2…. so no P.MIX instructions.

We’ve looked online for a version 3 manual without success, so far.

If you want to read up about P.MIX instructions, what you do is find a manual online for the T10J transmitter. The “Program Mixing” instruction pages start at Page 53. The T6K seems to have the first four channel mixers, though not the 5th and 6th mixer (with curves) that the T10J transmitter has. So if you feel happier using a Futaba manual as you tweak, then use these pages to guide you.