Removing the case of a Skyzone TS58500 5.8Ghz video Tx for FPV

A bunch of my flying buddies, including great FPV pilots like CHARPU and BayAreaCrasher, use the Skyzone TS58500 500mW video transmitter. I purchased a couple of them from GetFPV, but when I received them, they were encased in a metal housing. So instead of getting what the product looks like on the left (from the GetFPV website), I got this thing on the right, which is really heavy.

Andy from GetFPV tells me that the latest versions they have been getting are all in the housing, and that they have not yet opened one of the updated transmitters up to see how they can be removed.

I opened one of them up, and discovered that they are held in place by two blobs of solder.

This made the board difficult to remove because I only have two hands and one soldering iron. The blobs wouldn’t stay molten because the metal housing acts as a big heat sink; using a de-soldering pump proved to be difficult, and I didn’t have enough de-soldering wick to get rid of such large blobs of solder.

I thinned out the smaller of the two blobs and pried the case off of it. This pulled the pad off the circuit board, which worried me. After that one was off, I melted the larger blob and pulled the board out of the housing without any problems.

Tests show that the little transmitter still works, so losing the pad in the corner didn’t seem to affect anything. I love that this transmitter comes with a cable with both JST power and GoPro video/USB connector, and that it also comes with a connector with bare wires for custom connections.

I will heat-shrink it to protect it from moisture, and replace my heavy Boscam TS-353 in the Hovership MHQ2. Special thanks to Hovership for all of the recent advice!