Vaterra Suburban Electronic Woes

[yoyocambo]

Hello!

I'm new to the forum, and new to RC's in general. I just purchased Vaterra's RTR Ascender Suburban, and I'm very excited about it. I got a fully charged battery hooked up to it, and there are fresh batteries in the transmitter, but when I'm driving it, every two seconds it's like the receiver and transmitter will stop communicating for half a second. The motor cuts out, as well as the servo. Additionally, there is a blinking red light on both the receiver and transmitter that go out in time with the rest of the vehicle's cutouts. Both blink independently when the other isn't on, and they blink synchronously with each other when both are on.

I've already contacted Horizon Hobby's tech support, and after a week of waiting, all they told me was that I might need to purchase a new receiver. I purchased another receiver that is identical to the original one that came with the Suburban, but the transmitter won't bind to the new receiver. I sent Horizon another e-mail at the start of the week, but I'm kinda tired of waiting on them to respond and I wanna get this Suburban out there and wheel it.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

 

[TheLetterJ]

Does it happen sporadically and only last for a split second, or does it act as if it turned off and had to go through the startup sequence (beeping sounds) again? Reason I ask is that whenever I've had the latter, it's almost always been due to a bad battery connection. Another possibility is that your esc is set for the wrong type of battery and is hitting low voltage cutoff, very likely if you're using a nimh battery. Make sure that the jumper plug on your esc is in the appropriate slot for whatever battery type you are using.

As far as binding, if your Ascender included the cheaper tx/rx that comes with the ECX branded stuff (NOT Spektrum) binding should be pretty easy. Put a bind plug in the rx, power it up, then turn your tx on. It should be that simple.

 

[yoyocambo]

It happens almost like clockwork - it works fine for two seconds, then cuts out for about half a second. Then, it works fine for two more seconds, so on and so forth. It doesn't go through startup again, the motor and servo just stop responding for half a second. The esc jumper is on the correct pins, and I'm using a 2s LiPo battery. I believe it did come with the cheaper ECX tx/rx, and I've read the binding procedure many times in the owner's manual. It's the same as you described, yet no matter how close or far the tx and rx are from each other, they just won't bind.

 

[Voodoobrew]

Which tx/rx are you running? I only know spektrum but thay have a bunch of dsm2 recievers that don't work with dsm2 compatible surface transmitters.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

 

[crawlhog]

I had the same issue in one of my rigs , the problem came down to a bad, lose connection and bad solder joint

 

[yoyocambo]

Voodoobrew, I'm using the factory tx/rx that came with the suburban. I know theyre not dsm2, I think they're stx2 or something like that.

Crawlhog, do you remember where the bad connection was? I'm pretty sure I've looked over everything to make sure but I could have missed something.

Either way, I got in touch with Horizon Hobby's tech support again and they're sending me a new tx/rx to slap in and hopefully fix it. I do appreciate the replies though!