Tag Archives: futaba

Beginners Guide to Installing a New Transmitter for Your Boat ….!!

It’s quite hard as a Beginner to deal with some of the barriers-to-entry of radio sailing and especially anything to do with the radio control kit. Most likely in life, you will not have encountered it before!

The first quite likely thing to happen, is that you buy a nice second hand boat and the radio kit does not come with it. You’re “out there” feeling exposed straight away !! However, you can come to the same first-timer problem from quite a few start points.

It’s not all that difficult to do, but the first time it will not feel all that easy either. Whenever you pick up the transmitter manuals, for radio sailing first timers they are no use at all.

There are a multiple of ways to do this, and essentially it is the same process for all brands of transmitter. The most common transmitter brand at our club is Futaba, and this is what I used for the two methods described in this document.

If you are experienced and have some suggestions or amendments to make, please DO send them in so we can include them in a future revision.

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.

Receiver Experiment Comparisons….

At least three of us at Datchet are experimenting with receivers that come with Radiomaster. It’s interesting to compare with the regular Futaba Receivers.

You’ll notice that the Radiomaster unit has only channels one to three that we need. The first implication seems to be a substantial physical size reduction.

The next thing that caught my attention was the absence of dangly wire radio antennae. I know, I know – we shall see how it goes and report back!!

Like the Tour de France cyclists, we are in a sport which recognises the sum of marginal gains. If you’re in a weight sensitive class like Marblehead, you might also be intrigued by the weight comparison:-

Interesting!