T14SG Telemetry: Setting the Warning Level for the Flight Battery

Personally, I really like Futaba's telemetry function: this way, I can always accurately see how much juice my Phantom's flight battery still has. In this article, I will show you how to configure the T14SG to warn you when the voltage of the flight battery drops below a certain level.

(1.x firmware screenshot, but still suffices)

Configuring the warning is really easy and quick to do. You need to enter the linkage menu by tapping [LNK] twice. By this time I suspect this part of my transmitter having accumulated more fat than a burger...

Ignore the warning menu item, as we're dealing with telemetry instead. So please enter [TELEMETRY].

Normally, you will see only the two base telemetry data items that are always available: receiver voltage and external voltage, that is, flight battery voltage. Remember that you need to wire up the separate external voltage cable to the Phantom's main board in order to make use of this great function!

On another note: this telemetry configuration screen is about what telemetry data is available. It is not about telemetry display configuration, which is a completely separate beast. Unfortunately, the screens are easy to mix and Futaba did its best to cause naming confusion. After some time you will get accustomed to such quirks.

Setting the flight battery warning level.

Change to [EXT-VOLT] and tap [RTN], so you end up in yet another configuration screen. This time, it's the configuration screen of the warning levels for the external voltage (flight battery).

Now for the next idiosyncrasy: the THRESHOLD is the lowest good voltage, so the warning will be done when the voltage drops below the level you set here. Whoever at Futaba came up with this great idea for designing this configuration screen this way ... should be punished till Ethernity with an infinite loop of Shōgun.

You may notice that I configured 10.7V instead of 10.8V. Remember that in its default settings, the Naza-M has its first warning level set to 10.7V, it starts warning then. So as I set 10.7V the T14SG will warn only when dropping down to 10.6V and below. Consequently, I also lowered the Phantom's first and second protection levels by 0.1V respectively. This way, the transmitter will warn first before the Phantom does its short nose dive as its warning indication.

In the row VIBES you can select one out of several vibration patterns in order to get also a feeling for low voltages...

While we're at it, you should also unwire the factory default setting for switch SA. Per default, SA is wired up to control speech. However, as wearing a headset isn't exactly my style, I've cut off this «feature». Simply set SPEECH to [INH] and you're done. If you really like to hear your transmitter babbling then you may want to constantly wire it up to [ON] instead. To do so, set [INH] to [--] instead you then can choose to wire to [ON] or [OFF].

I've rather wired switch SA to select different stick rate curves.