Futaba 2.4 GHz FASST Service Advisory

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Futaba 6EX, 7C and TM-7 Service Advisory-

This service advisory affects only owners of the Futaba TM-7 module and 6EX and 7C FASST systems. Each FASST transmitter contains a unique eight digit identification code, programmed at the factory to identify the respective transmitter and to allow a receiver to be paired only to that radio's signal. Recently we have learned that a very small number of the TM-7 modules, and 6EX and 7C FASST systems were incorrectly coded with a common code number during the manufacturing process. These units were subsequently sold prior to our awareness of the situation.

If two or more units, utilizing this common identification code, were to be in use simultaneously, they may cause interference with one another. Please note: Units which utilize the correct identification code will not be affected by these units.

We're extremely confident that this is not a widespread problem. We know of only one instance in the United States. However, to give you peace of mind that your system is not affected, we will soon be setting up test stations at participating hobby shops throughout the country where you will be able to go to determine -- within a matter of minutes -- whether or not your transmitter is affected, at no charge to you. Or, if you prefer, you may send it in to our service center we will analyze it for you at no charge. If any problem is found, it will be replaced. We will gladly pay the postage for returning the unit and sending it back to you.

If you have questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact our Futaba Service Center at: 217-398-0007 or via email at: snipped-for-privacy@futaba-rc.com. Our staff is available to you Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm U.S. Central Standard Time.

Precautionary Measures and Information-

1) As with all radio control equipment, we strongly suggest that you pre-flight your aircraft thoroughly prior to flying. When flying at a location with other FASST owners, prior to flying we suggest that all pilots briefly activate their systems simultaneously to check for any interaction between units. If any interactions should occur, do NOT fly. Return the unit to the Futaba Service Center for immediate replacement.

2) Each time that your transmitter is turned on, it is imperative that you allow the FASST system an adequate amount of time to thoroughly boot-up completely before shutting down the transmitter. We recommend allowing the system at least five (5) seconds prior to turning off the power to the transmitter.

3) If the transmitter and receiver have lost their binding which required them to be re-linked, we recommend returning them to the Futaba Service Center for analysis. This is not expected behavior and should be investigated accordingly.
Reply to
Red Scholefield
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I use futaba but i'll wait a long time to have one of those. mk

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Reply to
MJKolodziej

Me too!

Ted

Reply to
Ted

C'mon troops. It's not an equipment problem it's a human error problem. The word is that someone at Futaba assigned IDs that were all zeros to a limited number of transmitters. Therefore one (or more) zero ID xmtrs were affecting other RXs which were being controlled by other zero ID Xmtrs. We're humans. We make mistakes. It could happen anywhere. I'm XPS but I'd take Futaba FASST systems over any others.

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Me too!

Ted

Reply to
Ed Forsythe

"Ed Forsythe" wrote in message news:B_KdnZMX9-Ih3QzanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com...

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I'm with Ed on this one. Just make a mental note to let the Tx boot-up completely and be glad that they haven't employed a soft switch on the Tx instead of a switch that actually turns it off - and drains your batteries while it sits in the supposed off position. By going to a software switch, they could prevent anyone from turning off before the

5-second boot-up period. Be glad they haven't.

Ed Cregger

Reply to
Ed Cregger

As a 2.4ghz pilot a thought I would post an email I have received from

contact in another flying field, which I believe was also posted o other RC websites.

" I thought I'd post this here in an attempt to avoid any accidents. am not trying to bad mouth anybody, just make people aware of _possible_ problem. Below is an extract from a e-mail I received this morning..."

Extract:

This post is one that I hoped I would not have to post.

On its own, it was a local anomaly that was restricted to 3 units, felt that there was no reason to ring alarm bells until we had got t the bottom of the problem.

I am posting it now for safety reasons as I have just found out fro the thread below That there has been another occurrence.

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Also rumours and false truths are out in the UK, so here an account o an actual expereince, please act on it sensibly.

Below is a copy of an email I sent to Ripmax in the UK around 1 wee ago. Ripmax are the UK distributors for Futaba and I know they have take immediate action, which is highlight earlier in this thread.

"I have to report to you a very serious problem with the Futaba FASST channel system. As you know I am a great supporter of Futaba, always have been. I also believe that the FASST system is far better than any of th competition systems. I have been flying the FASST for some months now and have been totall satisfied until now. In our club there is maybe 6 sets in operation, all of which hav worked perfectly on their own or with each other. No interference issues at all. Today I had a new member to teach to fly; he has 2 Futaba FASST 6 TX and a trainer with 1 RX in it. We were using the 2 TXs together on a buddy lead. All seemed fine, I taxied the model to the take off area and wa waiting for someone to land, and he was also on Futaba 6 FASST. I wa standing next to him; the model was in front of me to the left, so my T was between the model and his TX. Suddenly the throttle opened on the trainer and it was off, I had n control, it swung around to the left and shot off into long gras (luckily), this stopped the motor. When we returned to the bench we did a test. On the trainer we turned off the matching TX and then the TX of the gu next to me on the flight line (we will call him man A) was switched on and guess what? It had control of the model! We then turned on th models TX, it failed to operate or interfere with the model. We the turned off man A’s TX, the RX went to failsafe, and then 4 second later locked on to its own TX! We then switched on man A'’s TX, i again failed to interfere with the signal. We switched off the trainer own TX and the RX went to failsafe, 4 seconds later it reconnected wit man A’s TX. The RX would connect to 2 TX’s! We then tried the second T (belonging to the man with the trainer) the one that was used on budd lead. Well guess what! The RX worked with this one as well! We repeate the above test with switching on the other TX’s and every time w switched off the controlling TX, 4 seconds later it would bond with on of the other TX’s So to sum up; at this point we had a RX that would work with TX’s Next we tried other TX’s on the field (mine included) and thes would NOT operate the RX, it was just the 3 (2 belonging to the traine and man A’s TX.) We then rebound the RX in the trainer to one of the 3 TX’s tha would operate it, well, nothing changed, and all three could operat it. Man A had 2 models, both with 6 FASST RX’ in them. We turned on one of the original trainer TX’s and, well you hav guessed it, it could control BOTH of his models. We tried other TX’s (including mine) none of them would do th same. So in summary at this point we now have 3 TX’s and 3 RX’ tha will work any or all of the others! To further complicate things we tried the following. I took my TX (no problem with it and no interference on my RX from th other TX’s). We bound the RX in the trainer to my TX and …n problem, it would only work on my TX! We were very lucky today, someone could have been badly hurt or worse, this is a very serious issue.

We now have a ban on any 2.4 systems flying with any other 2.4 system. This needs urgent attention as many sets are out there."

This news will have to be made public soon for safety reasons. more information at

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" Again I wish to emphasis. I am not trying to bad mouth anybody, just make people aware of a possible problem, and to relay a report of any actual incident that has been reported to me, via a friend, that the author wished to be made public."

Please follow Futaba's guidance and do not over react. Please act on this report sensibly.

Reply to
mgfd

| On its own, it was a local anomaly that was restricted to 3 units

Well, perhaps, but the nature of this problem is that it'll hide itself as long as it's relatively rare.

Suppose that 1% of units sold are affected, have a GUID of 0. (Note that the 1% figure is made up.)

If you fly alone all the time, you'll never notice any problems. If you fly with one other person, the odds are 1% x 1% or 0.01% that there will be a problem. ...

If you fly with 9 other people (and all ten people have their radios on at once!), the odds are somewhere around 10% that one of your radios will have the problem. But since you need at least two people to have the problem for the problem to manifest, that knocks the odds of the problem actually manifesting for somebody to around 1%. (In this case, I didn't look up how to calculate those percentages exactly, so my odds may be slightly off.)

My point is that a lot of radios might have this problem, but the circumstances that cause it to cause a problem are quite unlikely as long as the number of radios with this issue is 1% or less. And the place where it's most likely to show up is a large contest or something where you might have dozens of people turning on at once. (I'll assume there's no impound for SS gear.)

Considering the number of events already seen, I'll bet there's a lot more than 3 faulty units out there, people who don't realize it becuase they've yet to fly with anybody else who had the same problem. Yet.

In any event, I'd say Futaba is handling it correctly. I certainly wouldn't suggest buying one of these radios until the test stations appear at the local hobby shop (or perhaps a diagnostics mode is discovered that will print out the code), but once that's there, I don't see this as a reason not to buy one. And as was already mentioned, this problem could have happened to any of the SS vendors

-- it was likely human error, not a flaw in the architecture.

(Unless they have a flash chip that can be cleared? Suns used to occasionally run into a similar problem where your unique MAC ID is encoded in NVRAM -- but if this gets cleared, you start with a MAC ID of 00:00:00:00:00:00 -- which works, as long as you're the only one ...)

Reply to
Doug McLaren

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Why ban all 2.4 GHz gear? That makes no sense at all. No two manufacturers use the same encoding/decoding schemes. Why punish those that own non Futaba sets? In fact, I wouldn't even ban Futaba sets. That isn't the club's job and few in the club, if any, are technically educated sufficiently to even begin to know what they are doing. Futaba's problem is limited to other Futaba equipment, not Spektrum/JR/etc.

I own one Futaba FAAST system with two receivers. Because of the simplicity of the system, it is being limited to small models. I have other manufactured 2.4 GHz equipment that I will use in my larger models.

Ed Cregger

Reply to
Ed Cregger

It may be a worse problem than Futaba is admitting to right now. Apparently, if you cycle the transmitter's power quickly enough it will be reset to ZGUID. The only way to recover from this is to send the transmitter back to Futaba.

So, if you are in the habit of quickly checking your transmitter's battery level, remember to wait a bit before shutting it down again.

Reply to
Douglas Bollinger

We all know Horizon/Spektrum beat everyone else to the market with 2.

GHz aircraft RC transmitters, and Futaba, like several othe manufacturers, has been desperately playing catch-up for most of th past two years while watching Spektrum walk away with a ton of sales.

I think what we're seeing here is one of the problems resulting fro Futaba's frantic rush to get something on the market. I sincerely hop it is also the last one, but we'll have to wait and see.

It's interesting that Futaba chose to use FHSS for their 2.4 GH systems, a technology that Spektrum had previously tested and foun wanting before choosing DSSS for their own 2.4 GHz RC equipment. Perhap Futaba chose FHSS primarily because they already had some experienc with it, and there was that need to get something on the market in hurry even if it was not the ideal technology for the job? Time wil tell, I expect.

-Flieslikeabeagl

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Reply to
flieslikeabeagl

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Let's not forget that Futaba was one of the first with 2.4 GHz gear for R/C cars, which preceded Spektrum by many years.

I own two Spektrum systems, one six and one seven channel. They work just fine, but I still like the idea of jumping from one frequency to another (out of many) over the Spektrum method of chosing two freqs and then beating back and forth between the same two freqs for the entire flight. Statistically, Futaba's SS system is much more robust. However, other than low battery problems causing loss of binding with the Spektrum, they seem to be working just fine.

Ed, NM2K

Reply to
Ed Cregger

I think this is an accurate summary from our doggy friend.

Apart from the fact that the current issues have nothing to do with FASST per se, but more, it seems, due to penny pinching the design around the way the FLASH ram is used to store GUID's..

The argument is raging as to whether its ever safe to store something so fundamental in RAM which can get corrupted. As much as how easy it seems to be to corrupt it.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

True. It's also true that RC cars d>

AFAIK Spektrum equipment transmits continuously on two frequencies, i does not beat back and forth between them. Either one frequency b itself would in fact do the job - having two provides a fail-saf redundancy. And if you get technically precise it isn't really tw discrete frequencies - it is two rather wide bands of frequencies (whic is why it's still spread-spectrum), which reduces the impact of an interfering signal.

I'm not an RF eng>

I take sh>

I had one radio lockout back in 2006 with a DX6/AR6000 that totaled on of my models; unfortunately it is very hard to be 100% sure if th problem was a Spektrum lockout or an overheating BEC.

I'm curious as to the actual statistical frequency of any problems wit Spektrum lockouts - in hundreds of flights with Spektrum equipment tha is more or less the only problem I've seen with the DX6 other than on or two minor throttle channel glitches over the years, and I'v experienced zero problems with my DX7 used with any of the Spektru receivers.

There is an inevitable downside to putting a microcontroller into an R receiver: microcontrollers run code, bad code can cause a lock-up, an any time power is applied microcontrollers take time to boot up! We gai many advantages over the older all-analogue receivers, but gain some ne failure modes to go with them. The well-respected Berg DSP receiver also had lockout/reboot issues before the 2.4 GHz stuff arrived on th market.

-Flieslikeabeagl

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Reply to
flieslikeabeagl

Very true, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. The po>

This didn't even occur to me, but you're absolutely right. A fe passing gamma particles (the sun streams them at us all the time) migh be all it would take...

-Flieslikeabeagl

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Reply to
flieslikeabeagl

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You sound like a software oriented (non RF) trained Spektrum salesman. I'm not going to argue with you. Think what please.

Ed Cregger

Reply to
Ed Cregger

Complete and utter speculation. mk

Reply to
MJKolodziej

But experienced and educated and, as I know from elsewhere, disinterested speculation.

However Futaba phrase it, I bet you this model of tranny will be (effectively) replaced inside of 6 months..

"It just got better!!" ;-)

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I've had exactly "one" problem with Spektrum. I had a Slow Stick lock up and be totally nonresponsive at SEFF last year. The Horizon Hobby team (on site for the event) was very responsive to the problem, checked out my equipment, and determined I had a TX range issue. They took my TX with them, sent me a brand new one. No problems whatsoever in the following 9 months! I had numerous problems with glitches on 72MHz, and I'm not going back.

PCPhill

I'll be manning the raffle at SEFF '08. If anyone from Rec.Models.RC.AIR are there, please stop by and say "Hi"! I'd love to put some faces to the names...

A side note: During the noon demos, Horizon had a midair with a huge Extra 260 and some other 3D plane. They gave the damaged Extra to my daughter (who was assisting the event director) and then sent her replacements for the damaged parts. Needless to say I'm a confirmed Horizon fan!

Reply to
PCPhill

Your analysis of my "sound" is seriously wrong, unfortunately.

a) I'm not "software oriented"; I sometimes write software for fun o to make my job easier, but my training is in something much more basi and much more fundamental - physics. That means I have a pretty soli grasp on such things as Maxwells equations, EM radiation, diffractio and interference, radiation patterns, fourier transforms, and so on, al of which are quite relevant to understanding RC equipment.

b) I most certainly am not a salesman for anything.

Since there is essentially zero other information in your comment there is no reply that needs to be made. If you have a specific issu you wish to discuss, we can always attempt discourse.

-Flieslikeabeagl

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Reply to
flieslikeabeagl

Which part? The first paragraph is objective fact, we've even had a least one Futaba rep post here on RCG admitting that Spektrum had caugh them flat-footed and they were racing to catch up. If you're in lawyering mood, those were not his exact words, but as close as I ca remember to the content of his post.

The second paragraph is speculation, yes, however it is based on th evidence I've seen so far. For example, when a company chooses t release a new microcontroller based RC transmitter in the year 2007 an it has only six model memories, it is a dead giveaway that this is a old product using old electronic components that are nearly obsolet technically - they must be from an era when the price of flash memor was so high that the cost of the few hundred bytes needed to store models settings was significant. Another giveaway is Futaba's use of custom RF chip in an era when 2.4 GHz spread-spectrum equipment i ubiquitous and dozens of much cheaper off-the-shelf solutions exist they probably were using what they already had and knew, rather tha taking the time to come up to speed with currently available parts. third giveaway is this enormous blunder with non-unique GUID's - tha smells of a rushed job if anything does.

By the way, if it isn't already obvious, I have nothing against Futab the company - in fact my first microcontroller based transmitter wa made by Futaba; back in 2005 I bought a Futaba 7CAP that served me wel until Spektrum made a better mousetrap.

-Flieslikeabeagl

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flieslikeabeagl

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