Have you just started radio sailing? You’ll be wondering how on earth the boat picks up radio signals from the unit you hold in your hands. Well, the answer is that the boat has an onboard “receiver”. This article is written to be a “quick guide” to your receiver.

The receiver in the photo above is very common. It’s the Futaba R3006 model which, I think means it can handle up to six channels. Look closely and you’ll see six rows of pins (numbered in blue, if you look closely) in that cream colour recess. For radio sailors, we generally only use two channels, so if the receiver has six channels, or eight channels etc, it is really only a passing interest for us.

This little radio receiver needs power which it receives from your onboard battery – in this photo via that little red plug in the background. When you first get your transmitter and receiver, they need to be “paired” if the factory didn’t already pair them before shipment, It’s just like “pairing” your mobile phone to your car. There’ll be clear instructions in the transmitter manual on how to pair devices.

Now each of those little rows of pins also corresponds to joysticks and controls on your transmitter. Each has its own channel. You will see in the photo that only two rows of those pins are plugged. The top row, channel one, is always for your rudder and talks to the left-right movement of the right hand joystick. We plug the winch for the sheets into the third row of pins, which corresponds to the up-down movements of the left joystick.

What about aerials? See those two little grey wires sticking out of the left side of the unit in the photo? That’s your aerials, right there. They are only around 10cms long each. They say that they are most effective when the two wires are at right angles, but really if you can arrange that then great, but in radio sailing probably “don’t worry”. We all have them inside our hulls – we don’t wind them up the rigging or anything like that.

They say that in drones the range can be 1500metres which amazes me. As we normally sail around maybe 200-250 metre ranges you’d think we’d be fine. You do sometimes see boats going out of range though. If batteries are low, then there are going to be realistic limits.

When you buy a new transmitter, most likely you will select to buy one with a matched transmitter. If you buy previously used kit, just make a point to ask the pervious owner if he is including the transmitter (often not), and including the receiver. It’s not expensive, so you just want to know before you buy.