At the big thermal duration contests this summer, how many have switched to 2.4 in open class molded ships? Is it fifty-fifty (2.4 vs. 72Mhz) or a small percentage of pilots using 2.4 ?

Eventually everyone is gonna move to DSS frequencies. Whether 2.4 or 5.6GHz. 72Mhz FM is obsolete as it stands.

2.4 was still a definite minority at the Polecat DLG contest last weekend.

Pat MacKenzie

When we switched to narrow band on 72Mhz how many years did the AMA and/or FCC give us?

I'm guessing 72Mhz will be around for about 10 more years.

Curtis

I'd say that I'm currently 50-50.
About half of what I fly is on 72, half on 2.4. Contests and sport flying.
72 is definitely NOT obsolete in my stable, and works great at contests. 2.4 is wonderful, it allows me to go down the street and practise at the local church field where 72 is not allowed due to proximity to the local power club's field.
It's all good.

Steve if you had come out to the field today to fly with the rest of the club you would have seen that 1/3 of the planes flying were on 2.4 ghz. Oh, by the way you missed a great day for flying.

Walt

Originally Posted by Hoot

At the big thermal duration contests this summer, how many have switched to 2.4 in open class molded ships?

Can't answer that exact question, but close.

What % of pilots entering one large contest are using 2.4? Look at the AMA NATS.

http://www.silentflight.org/NATS2008/Register.html

I added the #'s up. For the classes with large entries:

                2M    UNL      RES 
# entrants      62     96       86
# SS entrants    9     13       11
% using SS      15%    14%      13%

The table above is very informative, but we should note that Nats contestants may represent a biased sample. First, they are competitive by definition, and may be more likely to have the latest gear than a random sampling of flyers. OTOH, they may also be more likely to have carbon fuselages than a random sampling. In any event, it might not be accurate to guess that 14% of sailplane flyers have 2.4 gear.

Still, it's a big jump from zero, which is what it was not long ago.

Paradoxically, as more guys go to 2.4, the incentive to change diminishes, since the prospect of a frequency conflict 72 becomes lower and lower. So the dying-out of 72 will probably have a long tail, sort of like one of those exponential decay curves.

I've been on the 6 meter ham band for 30 years and I'm staying there with my sailplanes -- my park flyers and helicopters are on 2.4.

Hoot, from talking to Pete Goldsmith at JR/Horizon, our segment of the hobby has been slow in implemanting to 2.4, but...

As I have told Pete, 72 works just fine and is still and for a long forseeable time will be legal. some segments, such as IMAC, Pattern, and Pylon have changed almost entirely. IRCHA, the Heli guys at there jamboree held at Muncie, only ompounded about 175 72mz TX's out of 600 some that were at the event since so many had already changed.

The numbers from the Nats are some good numbers to reach for on a competition side, but at a contest like Mid South, there were two of us that flew 2.4 end to end. I have had a great start with it, it works great and at our MOM contests it makes functioning in that environment flawless.

A lot is coming in the future and 72 will fade some day, but not right now.

Marc

Thanks Nuevo for some objective information regarding 2.4 at large contests in Open class planes.

To add what Tony said, the diehards that stick to 72mhz (I'm one of them myself) will find more and more reasonably priced gear as its unloaded from modelers inventories. I know I'll make the switch someday, but in the meantime, I'm happy to let somebody else blaze a trail

Steve

Old technologies die slowly. I know 2 guys, active contest flyers, who still use Ace transmitters! On a similar note, I saw an article somewhere about how many millions of lines of Cobol are still running today. And the Hollywood video store chain has a whole network of checkout PCs running DOS. And so on...