Has anyone modded one of these to use push button firing? I have 2 of them and rather than buy a new tx, I'd like to use one of them. Other one will remain my dedicated aircraft radio.
Maybe, I've done button mods on a variety radios. If your just replacing a stick/gimbal with 4 buttons it is pretty easy, just building a voltage divider to change the voltage being feed to the control chip in the TX. The schematic is on this site somewhere, or try the SAS site (www.southeastattacksquadron.org) or probably a few other places. Sorry I don't have it handy to post. All you need is some good buttons, a few resistors, and some a hunk of wood to hold the buttons in the radio. If you're at all comfortable with electronics and soldering it is a pretty quick mod.
I am actually quite good at soldering, I used to be a Navy electrician and can even do pcb's Just not good at design, if I have a print to go by though, I can wire anything.
I was up for EM2 and a Senior Chief refused to sign my eval due to my refusal to sign a re'enlistment, so I left. If he had let me take the exam I would have made increment as I did on the EM3 exam, best score Navy wide for the cycle, 100% and was the only one to do it that cycle.
Been using my 9c for boats since 2003. It's been retrofitted with a spektrum module and firing buttons. I actually got smart and set it up with swappable right gimble/buttons. I added a 4 pin mini deans plug to the connections for the right gimble rather than hard soldering the wires direct. That way, if I want to fly, it is simply a matter of unpluging the buttons, couple screws to change out the physical buttons for the gimble and plug in the gimble. It's a very simple modification. We used the same general layout of switches/resistors that are in this article: http://www.scrapcombatships.com/articles/howto/BE-radiomodvg600.html White is +5v Yellow is Elevator signal Blue is Aileron signal Brown is ground I'll see if I can find a pic of the inside of my radio for you. edit: added in the wiring color details for the 9c (at least for mine)
Didn't find any stored on my computer so I popped the back off and took a shot. You can see that the wooden plate needs to be multilevel to cleanly fit in the same space as the original gimble. Mine is all 1/8" plywood. The buttons mount to a circle that's the same size as the gimble opening. There are little 1/8" thick wood pads between the circle and the mounting plate that the screws go into to make the height right.
Finished product: All of the trims still function too so you can fine adjust the throws for different brand switches (or servos if you go old-school). I really like having the dean's plug in there so that I can swap between gimble or buttons at will.
