Weather sensitivity?

[Irish Steve]

Hi Folks,

Query for the more technically minded here, how sensitive to something like a lightning flash would a 9X be. I don't know if this was the cause, this afternoon, I was flying my Trex 500 Clone, and all of a sudden, as I was making a minor trim adjustment to the ailerons, it suddenly went into a significant climb, which was not helpful as there is a safety net attached to the underside of the roof of the building we're using for flying

I closed the throttly instantly, which brought it back down again, but I wasn't quite quick enough to catch the descent with a quick inject of power, so it landed on the training gear pretty hard, and that was the last straw for one of the skid supports, which let go close to the side frame, but as far as I know, that's the only damage. Some of that is probably down to is being previously strained, it was originally set up with 3D pitch capability, which meant that a sudden throttle close, which is pretty common in early training, meant a massive down pitch moment from the blades. I've corrected that now, once I'd worked out how to.

I've not yet checked the rest of the machine, as far as I know, it's OK, as it wasn't a massive crash as such, and the tail rotor didn't clip ground.

What I'm more interested in is if a lightning strike somewhere in the area is a likely reason for a spike such as this. The radio has been in use for about 2 months now, and flown a number of hours in this heli, without so much as a glitch, so I've no reason to suspect that this was a fault with the radio or anything similar, and while the area we're operating in has a high level of RF activity in a lot of bands, we've not seen any issues on 2 different 9X sets since we started flying there. The TX is using a LiFe battery, which is still well charged, and the RX is drawing power from the ESC so I've no reason to suspect a glitch at that end.

In passing, before I get jumped on, we were indoors in a metal clad building, so I wasn't worried about a lightning strike as such, we were not exposed, and there are a lot of better lightning conductors in the local area. And the other thought, if this is a 9X basic firmware issue, please let me know, as I'm working towards the upgrade to ER9X (or similar) but we've been trying to make one major step at a time, and getting this Trex in the air was a significant part of that exercise. we have several 9X sets in use, and will be upgrading all of them, but I needed to get a machine flying before we started making massive changes to the radios.

Thanks

Steve

[MikeB]

If this was with the stock firmware, then who knows? It is known to have some problems although exactly what I don't know. I never used it, got the radio, did the mods and put er9x on it straight away.

I think you may get several responses saying, forget the stock firmware and go to one of the custom firmwares as soon as possible, they are all soooo much better.

Mike.

[cre8tiveleo]

What Mike said.

[Irish Steve]

Mike,

The plan is indeed to move to the custom, I've got the relevant devices to make that possible, but in order to avoid too many unknowns at the same time, we decided to get the Trex clone flying on the stock V2 firmware first, so that we at least had some idea of what we were doing. This is the first glitch I've seen, and we've got pretty much all of the radio side working remarkably well in as far as we've gone, but this glitch today came out of nowhere very suddenly, and I'd be surprised if it's a firmware issue as such, but I'm ruling nothing out, hence the question. The 500 is flying well (or to be more accurate, it's flying as well as my skill levels will let it ) and now that's been achieved, I'm happier to start moving on to the next stage of getting the radio upgraded, we're going to need the custom firmware to be able to use the full capabilities of a FLymentor, which will be going in a very old non CCPM Graupner Bell 212, which is the real reason for what's happening right now. It'll be fun getting the Bell in the air, as they are a huge machine, and very different to the Align and similar models that are so popular now.

Cheers

Steve