Hey guys, this surely has been a long and cold winter and is leaving me itching for getting back out to the flying field with warmer weather hopefully coming up soon. I wanted to write up a quick post about a safety mechanism that everyone who flies RC should be setting up on their transmitters and that is throttle cut. I currently still use my trusty DX8, so let's take a look at setting up throttle cut on a Spektrum transmitter.
Throttle cut does essentially just that - it cuts the throttle when engaged. Many of us know someone personally or we have experienced the danger first hand of an unexpected throttle blip that sends the prop flying wide open and our fingers, arms, and even face and eyes in danger or someone else's extremities in danger. I definitely have done this. Most of the time I have experienced this, I have my battery in the plane and have it sitting on a bench or the hood of my truck before a flight and for some reason decide to reach over my transmitter for something and either my sleeve or elbow catches the left stick and sends the throttle to full unexpectedly.
So far, I have only had some close calls and no emergency room visits as of yet and I hope to keep it that way. After that happening to me a couple of times, I decided to learn how to setup throttle cut on all my models. After I learned the procedure, I kicked myself for not doing this earlier. Needless to say that was a few years back and I have been using it ever since with good success.
The setup
On Spektrum transmitters of which I am mostly familiar with, the throttle cut option is simply part of the main menu. You scroll down to throttle cut and select this option. At first the feature is set to Inhibit which is the default (off) option of that particular feature with Spektrum. You then select the Inhibit and scroll that menu which basically selects which switch you want to use. As you scroll through the buttons you will see most of the ones you are familiar with. I for the most part choose to use the Gear switches and in particular Gear 1 switch. You also need to setup the percentage of the throttle cut. I set mine to -30% for my planes.
Also, a trick to this process is that you don't have your throttle cut engaged when you plugin your battery to your airplane and it syncs with your transmitter. If you do this, when you disengage the throttle cut, your plane's throttle will bump up to whatever percent throttle cut you set in the setup of the function.
Take a look at the video of this process below:
