Selecting electronics for your RC Plane (Part Two)

In part one of this article we showed you how to establish the power requirements of your remote controlled plane, and select the correct lipo battery.

In this final section you’re shown how to select the correct RC plane speed controller (ESC) for your park flyer, in addition to finding an appropriate brushless motor and propeller, as well as the actual results from our R/C Decathlon.

3. Select the RC Plane Speed Controller

This step is actually pretty easy – just determine how many amps your power your system will require and then get an ESC that can handle this.

The Decathlon’s system was estimated to run at up to 33A (max) on a 3S battery (look at the table from part one of this post for a 3-cell battery). Thus I picked an ESC that will support 40A, and would burst to 55A for short periods – allowing a wide safety margin for the requirements of my electronics and a good amount of power for this parkflyer.

See, I told you this step was easy!

Turnigy 40A Speed Controller

4. Finally, select the motor and prop

There are plenty to choose from – so it’s best to just read up on some reviews before making your final decision. www.bungymania.com is a good place to access a wide library of test results from different motor/prop combo’s.

For the radio controlled Decathlon, I selected the Turnigy 3536C motor, and matched it with a 10×7 wooden prop, again my research suggested this combo would draw about 30A at full power, and the motor was able to take the required 3S battery (11.1V).

Once I had everything, I secured the motor, ESC and lipo battery in my ARF (almost ready to fly) model kit and got ready to run some tests. I completed it with a Spektrum AR500 full range receiver, and some Parkzone and HXT servo’s I had on hand.

Turnigy 3536C 1100kV Motor - a great fit for larger parkflyers

So how does it perform?

At full throttle my watt meter reads 34A – so pretty in line with what I wanted, and thus I am really satisfied with this result for this RC model plane. Notice even after increasing the required power by 50% I found the motor was a perfect fit, in line with the Amps expected.

When flying the model, there is a good amount of power available but not excessive, it takes off steadily at 2/3 throttle, and it will fly around for about 15 minutes at just over half throttle thanks to the big 4400mAh battery.

The park flyer runs for about 9 minutes when I push the power a little more, and comes down with, at most, a warm battery, with each cell hovering around the 3.80V mark. The electronic speed controller comes down cool as well.

I’ve handed the controls around a little at the MARCS club in Melbourne, Australia, and the comments I have received are consistently positive – not excessively powerful but certainly with enough “oomph” when needed. It certainly manages spins, rolls and loops easily, so very much in line with the sportiness you would expect of a Decathlon.

So there you have it – four steps to pick the correct electronics system for your plane. I hope you’ve found this useful – and feel free to add any comments / questions below that you may have on this methodology.