Last year we wrote Beginners Manuals for radio sailors with Radiomaster, Flysky and Futaba transmitters. There is an excellent Spektrum manual from the USA for which we also published the download link. The manuals have been enormously popular and downloaded about 1,500 times in twelve months. Interestingly the most popular is for Radiomaster, followed by the Radio Sailors Manual for Futaba.
We have been busy recently on both Radiomaster and Futaba finding out how to implement some more advanced features for radio sailing, over and above what we all use normally.
These are:-
. Advanced Mainsheet Management
. 4 Position “Pinch and Puff” using joystick plus switch
. VMG Fine Tune for Mainsheet using volume dial control
. Flick Gybe on a Button
. Advanced Rudder Management
You can download the Implementation Guide for these features on Futaba by clicking here:-
When we launched the Datchet Radio Sailing website in late 2023, we had an eye on trying to reduce the inhibitors people often feel when they get into radio sailing.
A few “Beginners Guide” manuals were created as downloads, mainly for radio transmitters, but also the likes of installing new winches (very popular!), diagnosing problems in the electrics, installing new transmitters and so on.
The response has been amazing. In a few days time, the radio transmitter global downloads of the manuals are going to reach a total of 1000. It’s 985 downloads as I type (August 2025). Of those, about half are for the Radiomaster – interesting.
The beginners guide on how to fit a new winch has, alone, been downloaded 255 times. How to install a new transmitter has been downloaded 72 times.
The Futaba and Flysky manuals are about equally popular as each other – Futuaba slightly more so.
I have a Spektrum in the workshop ready to install on a Proteus IOM. I had a plan to produce a manual for that also (one day … takes a lot of time). In the meantime, there is a link to an excellent radio sailing manual for the Spektrum DX6 on a US based website. If anyone wants to give a hand with that, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
I managed to get my hands on one of these a couple of days ago. From the airplane and gliding world, the FrSky Tandem X20….. Bit of a wow. It was interesting to see what they use over in flying.
They cost about double (450GBPs) what radio sailors would think of as “pricey”, but can you tell the difference?
Amazingly – a resounding “yes”…. the feel was a huge step up from what we are used to. The body was a lot more solid (alloy maybe) and interestingly weighed about 900g so a bit heavier than common radio sailing transmitters. It felt very good in my size/shape hands. The “Apple” of transmitters maybe.
Gimballs (“Hall gimbals”) very smooth and more central on the console which somehow gave a nice balance (nearer centre of gravity perhaps) while you used it. Thinking about it more, if you move the screen to the top of the unit (most of our transmitters have the screen at the bottom), you can then move the gimbals down lower on the console itself.
Another thing I noticed was that the gimbals can be rotated slightly for those in search of more comfort over longer periods. Somehow, the whole thing looked more showerproof too. Really tightly fitted together.
When we decided to write the radio sailing manual for Radiomaster transmitters, I came across FrSky because the previous range FrSky along with Radiomaster use the same OpenTX software. FrSky seem to have abandoned that OpenTX strategy now as it was holding them back. They have done their own modern looking operating software called EthOS. That’s amazing too – it’s like having a full iPhone aboard, …all icons, colour and sexiness. Lots of preloaded configurations for power mixing and the like.
I might have misunderstood, but the owner said you could send updates (like custom model configurations) to it “over the air”…. so he can swap configurations with friends very easily.
The owner of the unit that I tried was a Competition Gliding fan. I asked what he used previously, and interestingly he had a Spektrum DX6E – which of course is very common in sailing.
Way over-configured for the needs of radiosailing, but it was interesting to see what £450 would buy you.
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