i am building my 1st bot and am looking for a sutable radio, i only need a basic one as i do not wish to spend $500 on a super duper SS radio

radio is not a place to scrimp on the quality.

its the most common failing of bots out there, and spectrum seems to avoid it pretty well.

Do you have a laptop or some such? If so I could probbly hack you up a digital setup for ~$200 or so.

If my thinking about some timing things is correct it should be good for 8 servos lol and it can give you information back ;->

Spectrums however seem to be "the new standard" and they arent that expensive i think glen was saying ~$300 and they seem to be worth every penny.
(using "standard" bits is good, as it means you can swap with other builders)
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

jeff had his spare 6ch spectrum he'd probably sell you
Not gonna be under $200 though... that's my offer
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That's got to be the most common comment I hear at work too...

...whether it's a rc plane/car/heli/boat all newbies try to skimp on the radio gear.
....my answer is usually "you've paid "x" hundreds/thousands of dollars on a rc vehicle but you really want to try to keep it under accurate control with a $80 to $200 radio ?.... yeah right - like that is going to work" ...

...and in this case you want to control a rc vehicle that uses active weaponry with a crap radio ?

hope you're not too attached to life and limb !
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There is no such thing as excessive carnage.

1 its a wedge, NO WEAPONS, and 2 i ve already spent about $50 on it,, and plan on not paying for steel or an ESC

The best place will be to search Ebay. Even if you don't have a weapon just yet, it would be better to get at least a 3 or 4 channel radio; you will grow out of a cheap AM 2ch radio really fast!. For that matter, avoid AM radios completely and get an FM one. The interference problems with AM will drive you crazy!
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

XD I had to revive this for future referance...
Nick (Grassy Nick) Decided to get the cheapest 4ch in the store, the venom 4ch... it was $130.
He got 1m range, crappy insane twitching and heaps of other problems (the joystics were only *pressed* into holes on the radio.
Lesson: DON'T SKIMP ON YOUR RADIO GEAR!
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Its a lot more expensive to be competitive in Robot Wars than we all thought to start with.

Cheap Radios will suffer interference
Cheap Batteries will go flat quickly or fail unexpectedly
Cheap Chargers will kill your batteries quickly
Cheap ESC's (servo switching) are finicky to build, unreliable and offer poor control

The featherweight class has now evolved to the point where you really need to think about $1000 to get started And we all thought we'd be building Heavyweights for "a couple of hundred" a few years back.

The good news is, most of that $1000 worth of gear can be used over and over again for years to come, unlike the chassis / hardware design which will be lucky if it survives a year or two.

Face it, its not a cheap sport.. If you cant stomach the entry price, buy a radio controlled car from Dick Smith and fit a wedge to the front of it. Or be patient while you gradually accumulate the quality gear.
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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

Also, learn from other peoples mistakes, it can save you a metric ass load of money! I can't remember how many things I bought and destroyed over the last 4 years.. I remember saving $80 back in 10th grade which took me nearly 2 months to do, bought these "Jumbo Servo" kits from Oatley Electronics going with the theory of using them for speed controllers. Well what we thought was a set of mosfets rated at 40amps was actually a set of power transistors suit for about 5amps. We build one, and blew it up on the bench... Servo wires were not wired to match the radio... Second one just got the IC hot and didn't work...

Talk to others, make every dollar count Its not a cheap sport, but it's cheaper if you follow other peoples advice.
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

Indeed...
Now who wanted to buy some A123's first?
With radio's though I must say for $200 you can't go wrong with a futaba skysport... it's served me flawlessly though my events.
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Yeah I 've been really happy with my skysport too. All in all its probably one of the most common controller I 've seen at the interstate events. I would consider it the controller of choice on a budget. For only $50 for Grassy could have got one, I got mine for 180, and its range is great. Especially with servo switching, as any jitters wont actually flick the switch.

An expesnive mistake for Grassy, hopefully the controller improves or can be fixed. What Aaron said is spot on.

Here is some mistakes we can not only learn from but also benifit from. Check out the RC Speed boat forums, Ive heard there are a bunch of spektrum radios for sale. Weather it be true or not, there is now a stigma surrounding the spektrum radios and water. It is beleived that 2.4ghz is around the freq that microwaves use to boil water (thats how they cook) and that when you send a 2.4ghz signal to a receiver that is only a short distance above water, half the sign wave is absorbed into the water, resulting in a greatly deminished range. There have been reports of speedboats quickly going out of radio range and screaming off into the sunset. What this all means is that anyone who has bought a spektrum radio for a boat and has since heard this, is now trying to offload their radios. I'll try and find some links at work tomorrow and post them when I get home.
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Regards,
Marshal J.

Last edited by TeamFroggy on Sat Jul 22, 2006 6:44 pm; edited 1 time in total

I think 2400mhz (2.4Ghz) is the resonating frequency for Water (H2O). Link me to some cheap specktrums Jimmy!
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

i can confirm that 2.4gHz is aprox the frequancy of a standard home microwave. (Learnt this when setting up a wireless network between 2 houses, and it would work occasionally then drop out when the microwave was switched on )

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Originally posted by Knight:
i can confirm that 2.4gHz is aprox the frequancy of a standard home microwave. (Learnt this when setting up a wireless network between 2 houses, and it would work occasionally then drop out when the microwave was switched on )

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