Q-135: I recently attended the weak Signal RC Show in Toledo, Ohio. During my travels around the show I was surprised to see what appeared to be a new concept in RC systems being shown at one of the booths. I believe the new concept was called, “Spread Spectrum.” Can you provide some details on this?
A-135 Many of us saw this system displayed at the Horizon Hobbies booth at Toledo. The specific system shown included a spread spectrum module, that operates on the 2.4 GHz band and plugs into an existing RC transmitter. A mating spread spectrum receiver is being sold with this module. At the present time Horizon is selling this system only for use with surface vehicles (primarily for RC cars!). Spread Spectrum RC systems are still in the developmental stages for aircraft use.
I suspect all of the RC manufacturers will quickly get involved with this new concept. There are many advantages claimed for spread spectrum use. Fellow AMA RC Frequency Committee member, Dan Williams, was asked to prepare a technical paper on Spread Spectrum RC for publication in MA. That article is scheduled to appear in print in the July 2005 issue. I urge you to read that article because it will clearly bring you up to speed on what it is, how it works, and what we might expect from it in the future.
The one very positive point I want to make at this time is that Spread Spectrum
RC systems will not obsolete any of our present systems nor take anything away
from our regular 50 RC channels that operate on 72-73 MHz. The new channels will
be in a totally different portion of the radio spectrum. Keep in mind that 2.4
GHZ (gigahertz) is the same as 2400 MHz. So you can compare 2400 MHz with our
present 72 MHz. It is totally unlikely that one band of operation could
interfere with the other. So knowing that you aren’t losing anything, but may be
gaining something, please keep an open mind and read all of the future articles
on this subject to kept abreast of the progress.