I’ll bet that a good number of my (male) friends have been spending their Thanksgiving family time playing computer games. Among them are successful CEOs and VC partners… but there is something about late evenings during family holidays that brings us all back to simpler times. After all of my family went to sleep, I spent the late evening swapping the 2.4G Futaba setup in my Hovership MHQ2 with a EzUHF setup. I had been using a FrSKY TFR4-B Futaba-compatible receiver [in stock at GetFPV, as of this article date], which weighs almost nothing and performs well with my Futaba T8FG radio, but I have been wanted to get into UHF for awhile, especially after seeing little quads go into failsafe as they fly behind bushes and trees. One of the problems with UHF in the past was that they most-often were stand-alone transmitters connected to existing radios using a trainer port. This made UHF setups very bulky and unsuitable for carrying out to remote flying locations.

A lot of my friends are now using the FrSky Taranis X9D Plus [Amazon], which accepts JR modules for plug-and-play UHF (and more). The EzUHF JR Module for Taranis [Amazon] works perfectly with the X9D, so I purchased both the new radio and the JR module to go along the small EzUHF 4-channel Lite Receiver, which can output 8 channels using a single PPM output. This little guy is frequently out of stock, but you can find it at Team Black Sheep, GetFPV, and RangeVideo.

Learning a new radio setup is a pain in the butt, and I’ve found that I learn a new radio brand more quickly by trial-and-error than I do by reading manuals. All of them are in the “death by a million menu options” category of user experience. Eventually, I figured out that you have to define inputs and then mix outputs on the Taranis before aux channels make it out into the world. It is fairly simple once you figure it out, but chance of failure is high unless you are already in this world.

I’m using Naze32 as a flight controller, so I ran Baseflight Configurator to make sure everything was going well… and was forced to update the firmware to use the current Baseflight. This wiped out my settings, so I had to reconfigure everything. The documentation for Naze32 is pretty light, and if you are just embarking on this journey, you will have some heavy Googling to do. This video is the one I used to set it up the first time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EscTgmEgnrc]

Each time I configure one of these little quads, I’m reminded how far the Phantom and other DJI products have come out of the hobby world.

Finally, I know that Steve over at Hovership is using an Open LRS JR module with his Taranis. Open LRS hardware is really cheap, but it seems to require a lot more technical knowledge to configure.