The RC jitters

[eckloss]

Looking for a brainstorm on what all may cause the jitters?

Servos and motor twitching, stuttering, and jumping.

More than one person, myself included, had such a bad case of the jitters the boat was unusable. Makes me think there was some form of interference in the immediate area (Carmel pond).

We checked, nobody else was using the channel.

[Ralph --- SSBN 598]

From my own experience, I have servo jitters and motors run uncontrolled.

The jitters had more than one source.
Antenna too close to the motor and too close to the ESC.
Also, I had the antenna looped in the cylinder and the length of the loops where to short.

I lengthened the loop and move the antenna away from the motors and not over the top of them.

The servos jitters from the antenna issue and there was another problem.

Also I learned that I had too many power sources going to the Rx.
I had a dedicated set of wires from the battery to the Rx.
I have 2 ESC in the boat and learned that they also provide power to the Rx.
The suggestion I got was this.
Remove the dedicated power wires from the battery to the Rx.
Clip the red wire on the second/non primary ESC.
Run the Rx from the main ESC only.

All the servo jitters went away.
The motor running funny stopped.

I am not an electronic person so I would have never thought to remove the two of three power sources
In fact, I did not know the ESC back feed power to the Rx.

I do know that when a system requires two different voltages, then two batteries are needed or a voltage drop regulated circuit is needed.

[bob the builder]

The fact that many people are having this issue and that it only happened at the pool at Carmel, leads me to think it's local interference. Kevin should pull out his electronics wizardry and whip up a signal detector. It would be cool to be able to tune it to a channel and see what kind of noise is on that frequency band prior to operation.

Another thought, is it when the boat is on the bench, surfaced in the water, or submerged? Wondering if they heavily chlorinated the pool recently?