Got the new radio last Thursday and installed it in the boat the same day. Installation was no different from any other radio except that you need to (should) make a single line switch so that you can program the Smart winch at the RX rather than at the TX. Rob Guyatt explains how to do it on his site.
http://www.users.bigpond.com/rmgsw/Spek ... LineSwitch
Sailed the boat on Sunday with only one minor glitch that fixed itself after a few minutes. After putting the boat in the water and sailing it away from shore, the response from the servos seemed to be really slow. I would put the rudder hard over, for example, and I could count to 3 before the boat began to turn. Not a good feeling. I managed to not hit any other boats and sailed back towards me where the problem stopped.
After that, it never happened again and I was able to sail the boat a long way from shore with out any loss of control.
I have no idea what might have been the reason for this glitch and the manual did not offer any ideas except that there is a fail safe in the "Throttle" stick that cuts the engine to ideal if the signal is lost or the RX battery drops below 3.8v. Since the slow response was in the rudder servo, this did not make much sense to me.
The radio may have just been searching for a channel when this happened and we do sail near a TV tower, which might have been giving a little interference.
Anyway, like I said, it only lasted a couple of minutes and after that there were no problems.
The radio is easy to program and setting End Points on the servos is a great feature. You can fine tune the travel in the rudder and the jib trim. Not having the knob is a non issue for me as I use the #4 stick to control the jib trim. However, it might have been nice for you guys who still use a twitcher.
Two other members of my club have already rushed out and got one and they too have already installed them in their boats.
So far I am sold on it. Will let you know more after the next regatta and more boats in the way.
There are now over a third of the boats in the Florida EC-12 Association using 2.4GHz radios. Finding open frequencies is quickly becoming a thing of the past. And there are far fewer of us getting poked by antennas.[:D]
Joe Walter #24