I'm quite intrigued about the issues with battery capacities on Futaba radios.
FLJ (and absolutely no reason to doubt his word) is saying that his Futaba rig would last no more than roughly 30 minutes on a fully-charged battery. If you think about it, it means Dave's rig would have been pulling something like 1.4'ish amps from the stock 700mA battery. It's no wonder he had gripes with such a puny run-time. But on the other hand, 1.4 amps sounds a hell of a lot of juice for a transmitter pumping out just a handful of milliwatts. So where is all that juice going?
I use a similar rig as FLJ's, with the only difference of a couple extra channels. In contrast to his 30-minute run-time, I'm still using the stock 700mA battery supplied with the set, yet find I'm getting much more than a measly 30 minutes. An example of a typical run-time would be something like this...
1: Fully-charged battery registers approx' 11.2 volts.
2: Fly the plane/sail the boat for roughly 15 to 20 minutes.
3: Stop for a natter/roll a cigarette/refill the tank.
4: Have another fly/sail for a further 15 to 20 mins'.
5: Stop for a natter, etc....
6: Let the radio/engine/motor have a rest for a while.
7: Check to see that the Tx battery is still good. It is -- registering 10.3 volts.
8: Have another fly/sail for a further 15 to 20 mins'...
...and so on.
Three hours later the battery is registering 9.8 volts.
We all know Futaba are notoriously stingy when it comes to supplying their stock batteries, but even my backup battery is a bog-standard 700mA jobby because so far I have had no reason to stuff one with a larger capacity in there. Could it be that Futaba may have serious design flaws with that particular model which FLJ experienced, rather than it being down to the battery itself? If that is the case, then is bad reflection on Futaba's part, because, in FLJ's case, it painted such a bad picture that he ended giving that rig away and never got to appreciate what should otherwise have been a pleasant introduction to Futaba's usual top-class quality.
Turborix?
Am I understanding it correctly? You mean to say that you have to plug the sucker into a PC in order to alter any parameters??
Now that could be a real bummer -- especially if you need to quickly alter the throw rates or somesuch.