[Guest]

Adding a second battery and switch in parallel reduces the chance of a battery or switch failure causing loss of signal by half.

How can adding more switches magically decrease their failure rate?

Are you saying if I have 40 servos on my elevator I am 40 times less likely to have a failure? No, it will just take 40 failures to lose a plane, but thats not the same thing as decreasing the probability of a failure.

No, replace 1 600 with 2 1200's, very small weight gain over the original

1 standard 600 mAh pack is roughly 4 oz....a 1200 mAh Nicad (high capacity cells) is roughly 4 oz.....so you doubled the weight....if your plane had enough capacity with 600 mAh you increased the weight for no gain other than some magical reliability increase which with proper maintenance is a non-issue.

If I double the weight of every component of my airplane for redundancy it would be 20 lbs and fly like a brick on steroids!

I have never found it necessary to need to fast charge at the feild when using 2-1500mah packs. Usually get 5-6 flights, and go home with 1/2 charge remaining!

So basically you are carrying around dead weight then...and decreasing potential performance of your model.

Some even add a second receiver, and split the control surfaces between the 2 systems. But receiver failure is extremely rare.

Redundancy is important as well to those guys.

Sure it is, but the larger the plane the more ability you have to add those features and not hurt performance.....this is not the case on smaller models.

If you have flown that long and that many flights and never had a single battery failure, you are very lucky.

Luck is not factored into the equation.....I am just diligent about my equipment maintenance.....I dont have 5 year old packs, I dont use old packs, damaged packs, crashed packs, funny looking packs, packs that are from the drawer, packs that are not labelled, non-Sanyo cells etc etc etc. I only use quality peak detect chargers to charge....I know exactly per flight how many mAh I use, and if that number changes something is not right and things get inspected....if it doesnt look right it goes in the garbage.

I suppose though if you rely on luck with regard to equipment failure its probably a wise idea to have some redundancy....personally I would rather spend the effort on maintenance and have a lighter better performing airplane :P

My oldest Enigma (this would be its third season) has made it to just slightly over 2000 flights....I had one aileron extension go bad. The receiver pack was replaced after the first 1000 flights, the servos were serviced after the first 1000 flights, after the second 1000 flights I needed motors in both aileron servos. Other than those items it flew day after day without a problem.....I run an 1100 mAh nicad and pull around 200 mAh per flight.