Re: Reduced range

| I tried to fly my Extra 300s today. It's fitted with an Airtronics RX and | TX. The rx has a 6 V battery and the tx has a 9.6V battery.
`The rx has a 6 V battery' -- is that a 5 cell NiCd pack, or is it a 4 cell alkaline pack? Or something else? | So I took the plane to a frozen pond hoping to fly...winds 8-10mph.
The radio waves would bounce off the pond (or a lake), but I wouldn't expect that to make much of a difference in a range check.
| During preflight I noticed that I wasn't getting the normal range | when checked at about 100ft away.
How far away did you get before you saw servo chatter with the antenna all the way down? If it was 100 ft, that sounds good and it sounds like it's time to fly ...
| Anyway to shorten things I didn't feel comfortable so I packed it | in and went home.
Prudent.
| I had a friend check the voltage on both tx and rx. The tx voltage | was good 9.6 - 10 V. However, the rx was down to 5 and 5.1 V.
If a 5 cell NiCd/NiMH pack is at 5.1 volts, it's almost dead, and you should not be flying with it. It won't show reduced range, as it'll work just fine at that voltage -- but it will not last much longer. Perhaps only a few minutes longer. Time to charge.
If that was a 4 cell pack, then that voltage sounds ok, though it's possible if the battery wasn't previously fully charged that it's almost dead now. Or it might be fine. You just don't know, which is why you need to always fully charge it.
| Is this normal for the Airtronics rx battery pack? Would this | reduce the range? It was sitting idle for about week and half, so I | had it on charge for about 8 hours this morning to top it up.
Unfortunately, doing a short slow charge to `top it up' is problematic. Either charge it for the full 16 (or whatever) hours, or don't fly.
A better solution is to get a peak charger, even a cheap one. Then in an hour or so, you'll be SURE that it's fully charged. Something like one of these (depending on your budget and power source) --
(of course, these are only a few of many possiblities.)
| I'm wondering if it's still good?
Not enough information to tell. Ideally, you'd cycle your cells, but that's outside the scope of this post. ( But the Triton charger, listed above, can do it for you.)
| Any suggestions?
Already made ...

If your battery packs check out as per the previous posts, then you probably have one of two things - a broken antenna wire on the rx (it may be kinked somewhere- the most common problem - especially check where it is pulled tght on the outside of the fuse), or otherwise your tx aerial is loose.
Easiest is to check the range against another one of your planes if you have one. If the same thing happens, then its obviously limited to the one plane and it must be either the batteries or the rx. (I'm betting on the rx)
Hope that helps.