If you want to avoid this sort of "tragedy", it would be better to invest in a bit more advanced radio equipment, preferably with telemetry capabilities.
As I mentioned above, telemetry can monitor signal quality at the receiver for you, and warn you well in advance of any problem that might be developing.
On one occasion I had a receiver antenna that got blanked out by a hidden carbon element inside the fuselage. I did a range check, everything just fine. I got a low signal warning in flight, landed immediately, then did a 360° range check around the model, and thus found out that there was some sort of dead corner of reception at a certain angle. Without telemetry, I might have ended up with some wreckage with a blinking led on the receiver telling me there has been a problem. I take gliders hundreds of meters up, never had any problem of signal strength or signal loss.
Once you have telemetry, you can add a current sensor and have the radio calculate the consumed mAh for you and call them out, instead of guessing the remaining battery by using a timer. You don't guess the fuel remaining in your gas tank by timing how long you've been driving, do you?
Another protection that I always use in somewhat larger models is dual power supply. I add a separate receiver battery and its own BEC, and combine that with the integrated BEC of the ESC to have redundancy. I used a dual Schottky diode, a component that costs less than 1 Euro, to combine both power inputs. Now I used a 10-channel receiver (covers 24 channels really, if you use the Fbus to connect more than 10 servos) with stabilization (the auto-level is handy when I lose orientation of the model), mentioned telemetry capabilities and dual power supply input, and it costs around 50 Euro. No need for non-genuine receivers of any kind.
Fail-safe positions for each channel ensures that in case of signal loss, the model will throttle down to idle and make a shallow descending turn.
In the last 10 years since I got back to RC, I have never lost any model to signal loss (signal strength telemetry) or "brown out" (dual power supply), no LVC (current and consumption telemetry), only to pilot error.
As I mentioned above, telemetry can monitor signal quality at the receiver for you, and warn you well in advance of any problem that might be developing.
On one occasion I had a receiver antenna that got blanked out by a hidden carbon element inside the fuselage. I did a range check, everything just fine. I got a low signal warning in flight, landed immediately, then did a 360° range check around the model, and thus found out that there was some sort of dead corner of reception at a certain angle. Without telemetry, I might have ended up with some wreckage with a blinking led on the receiver telling me there has been a problem. I take gliders hundreds of meters up, never had any problem of signal strength or signal loss.
Once you have telemetry, you can add a current sensor and have the radio calculate the consumed mAh for you and call them out, instead of guessing the remaining battery by using a timer. You don't guess the fuel remaining in your gas tank by timing how long you've been driving, do you?
Another protection that I always use in somewhat larger models is dual power supply. I add a separate receiver battery and its own BEC, and combine that with the integrated BEC of the ESC to have redundancy. I used a dual Schottky diode, a component that costs less than 1 Euro, to combine both power inputs. Now I used a 10-channel receiver (covers 24 channels really, if you use the Fbus to connect more than 10 servos) with stabilization (the auto-level is handy when I lose orientation of the model), mentioned telemetry capabilities and dual power supply input, and it costs around 50 Euro. No need for non-genuine receivers of any kind.
Fail-safe positions for each channel ensures that in case of signal loss, the model will throttle down to idle and make a shallow descending turn.
In the last 10 years since I got back to RC, I have never lost any model to signal loss (signal strength telemetry) or "brown out" (dual power supply), no LVC (current and consumption telemetry), only to pilot error.
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