Receivers going bad while in storage

[ululi1970]

Over the last couple of years I had 3 receivers (ACCST) going bad while not being used. In all cases, the receiver had not been used for several months, either because I did not fly the plane/drone or because I sold the airframe. The receiver was working properly when stored. After pulling out of storage, the problem would manifest with very low RSSI despite having the radio close by (from 3' to 10' away). The last instance occured with a S8R. Used it last time 6 months ago, working fine. Couple of days ago I put it into a EDF I am building, and discovered that RSSI was in the low 60's with the radio 10' away. Putting the radio in range check dropped the RSSI to 35 at the same distance. Obviously this RX is not going to fly my EDF. More or less, this is what happened in all other cases.

For the record, I replaced the receiver with an older X6R upgraded with the UNI firmware and it is working fine, which rules out radio problems.

Has anybody experienced similar problems. Again, the receivers that went bad were stored properly. In all cases, the problem manifested as low RSSI. Could it be capacitor degradation over time?

 

[Wayne]

Could still be a radio problem. Uni has a tuning process where it will match the receiver frequency to what the transmitter is actually outputting. FrSky firmwares do not do this.

With the above said, I seriously doubt that would be enough to have such poor reception on your S8R.

I have some X8R receivers that are probably 8 years old in my fleet and they are still going strong. I have not seen the receivers "age" out like some brands used to in the frequency days. Might be worth looking at the antennas on the receivers and see if there are any signs of damage. I guess if you have a high humidity issue, that could degrade things..? Corrosion on the coax? I'm in a pretty dry part of the country, so no idea if that would be an issue..

Anyone else have issues with age on their FrSky receivers?

 

[jure]

I have the case of a G-RX6 receiver which all of a sudden refuses to bind.
I have tried with two different QX7 transmitters.
From close distance , and farther away. no difference.

 

[ululi1970]

The first two receivers went bad in North Carolina, the last one in Phoenix. So humidity may have been a problem for the first two, but surely not for the last one.
The radio (a Horus X10S) is working fine with a bunch of ACCESS and ACCST receivers. I got rid of the first two receivers, I will look into the the antennas of the last receiver.
BTW, any chance that a version of the UNI software be made available for the SxR type receivers?

 

[Wayne]

Sorry, no plans for Uni for the SxR units. They may well be able to use Uni without any stabilization, we have not looked into that at all.

@jure - Might want to send those into us and Chris can do some testing and see if we can get them back to life. Very curious.

We have the occasional report of a dead receiver, that is not uncommon. Receivers can have a hard life. We have never really had reports of "aged out" receivers, so it might be interesting to play with these a bit and see if we can find a common issue to them. I don't really want to mess with the SxR receivers though as they are a more complex animal and honestly none of us here at Aloft uses them, so a bit of a blackhole for us. We keep saying one of these days we will setup a plane with one, but we never have after this many years.

 

[jure]

@jure - Might want to send those into us and Chris can do some testing and see if we can get them back to life. Very curious.

Thanks Wayne , let's try that as an academic exercise.

 

[ululi1970]

Will do. If would be nice to know if I am doing something wrong or it is the receiver.

 

[ululi1970]

I misspoke earlier. The recent problem with the stabilized receiver occurs when bound to a X20. I bounded it to my older X10S and the RSSI is fine. To summarize:
S8R ACSST V2 bound to X20, low RSSI.
S8R ACSST V2 bound to X10S, RSSI ok.

X8R and X6R with UNI fw bound to either X20 or X10S RSSI ok.

Wayne, do you think there may be a problem with the RF deck of the X20? I got the radio in April of last year from you guys. It works fine with Archer receivers.

 

[Wayne]

Sounds like more testing might be in order.

With only this statement:
S8R ACSST V2 bound to X20, low RSSI.
S8R ACSST V2 bound to X10S, RSSI ok.

Then I would say yes, sounds like an issue with the X20, but because you have no issues with other receivers on the X20, I'm back to thinking your X20 is fine.

So more testing?? Give it a few more tries with the problem receiver. Curious.

 

[ululi1970]

I think I still have a couple of X8R Pros that have not been upgraded to the UNI fw. I will have to fish one of the out of the bowel of a P47. Will post with updates.

 

[Landru]

Thanks Wayne , let's try that as an academic exercise.

I'm curious to know if you guys get to the bottom of the problem.

In other cases, I've seen ESD named as the culprit in the death of a receiver. It's never happened to me (knock on wood). However, I have read reports from very experienced modellers who claimed to have killed a receiver via handling.

 

[jure]

I'm curious to know if you guys get to the bottom of the problem.

we need just some patience now. The RX was shipped, and it is already in good hands.

 

[johnjonke]

I'm very interested in the outcome of this! I have three G-RX6 glider receivers that had been serving me well...then one by one the RSSI dropped seemingly overnight from 100 plus at the bench to around 70 which made them unusable. They all lost their signal strength while not being flown...one day they worked and then they didn't...I discovered the issue each time by launching the glider and then immediately getting low RSSI warnings. I have replaced them and my Taranis X9D Plus transmitter is working great with other G-RX6, G-RX8 and RX6R receivers.
I'm convinced that these low RSSI
receivers are salvageable...so I'm watching for a good diagnosis.
John

Sent from my SM-S906U1 using Tapatalk

 

[Landru]

The receiver 'sudden death' phenomenon brings to mind an experience of mine from several years ago:

I went flying two days in a row. On the first day, I flew a 2m CF thermal / warmliner e-glider. There were no problems to report in an hour plus of thermal flying and zooming around. The second day, I powered up the same model (with the same type of 3S battery pack) only to discover that the two servos in the starboard wing were non-responsive. A thorough investigation back at home showed the servos were completely dead. They were nice MKS servos RIP.

Later, a private conversation with an RCG user revealed that the ESC/BEC in my model (Castle Creations) is suspected of an occasional damaging voltage spike at power up. The theory is the only one I've been able to come up with.

 

[ululi1970]

@johnjonke , I had exactly the same experience with a couple of X8R receivers. One day they worked fine, the next the RSSI was down the drain. Luckily RSSI telemetry alerted me about the problem before too late.
As far as the S8R goes, the behavior is a little puzzling: when bound to my X10S, it works fine. When bound to my newer X20, the RSSI experiences sharp drops (to the 30s) and it never stays close to 90 even with the X20 close. I tried the X20 with older X8R with the UNI fw, and it works fine. It seems to work fine also on X8R Pros with the V2 firmware, so at this point I am not sure what to think. I think I have a X4R somewhere that I can use for some testing. It has the UNI fw, but I believe I can revert to V2 (Wayne, if I revert to V2 from UNI and I want to go back to UNI do I need to go through the activation process again?)

 

[Wayne]

No, you should not need to reactivate.

 

[ululi1970]

Ok, then it should be easy to test with UNI and V2.

 

[ululi1970]

I tested the X20 with a X4R. Both UNI and V2 work fine. No RSSI issues. At this point I think the problem must be with the S8R, but why it shows up only when connected to the X20?

 

[Landru]

Just curious: Is your X10S running EthOS or OpenTx?

If the latter, I suppose the OS may be a factor.

 

[ululi1970]

I am running OTX on the X10S. But OTX does not run the ISRM module