We have flown in some of the most remote regions in the world on my channel. We fly at long range short range. Medium range indoors, fpv, pretty much if it flies. You can see it right here on the channel. So please do subscribe, but today we're talking about a radio that you can trust the radio master tx16s. This is my radio of choice for Music, 2020.. Music. All right guys welcome to my review of the radiomaster tx16s and it's outdoors, because a lot of times i explain this hobby like outdoor playstation, um, it's, fun, it's, like a video game, and it gets you outside the house you're not sitting indoors all day or trapped In a room and during covet times, it's kind of cool too, because we get to get out here in these remote locations and just get away from people for a little while, which is nice if you're looking for that solace, this radio will get you out there As far as just about as far as you want to go, it is a 4 1 multi protocol which supports all kinds of different protocols, we're going to go through them, there's over yeah over 40 different protocols inside this internal module. The internal module works off this 2.4 antenna up top and you have the jr bay in the back to expand it. It has been upgraded as well. What i'll also like is they have an extra large battery bay in the back we'll talk about that in just a minute.
They have an extended kickstand on here, which is also super cool, it's taller and longer than the other kickstands and it's also removable. So if you break this, you could put a new one on there, folds down like that for a little flatter profile to put in your case and this time on the tx16 max edition. They have these leather side panels, which is super cool. This one is the cowboy color you can also get like a lighter version of it, but these go on and off. If they start to wear out, you can get new ones which is kind of cool, but i think they look a little cooler once they get a few scratches on the sides. We also have larger rubber panels that are on the back for the grip, and it makes a nice ergonomic feel it feels pretty pretty good in my hands, which is nice and this one versus like the se model. We have to talk about the different models that radio master makes. They make a version with hall, sensors and the standard version and an sc version. The se version is their cheap version, so the sc one you can get it doesn't have the full blown 401 multi protocol module in here. It only supports about three different rf protocols in there, but this one and the 169 dollar version the halt with the hall sensors. Also the master fire combo. You can get with crossfire that supports all the different protocols out there around the world.
So, like 40 different protocols, which is kind of crazy, so we're going to go through that menu i'm going to show you what's in there everything from traxxas to spectrum receivers. You can bind up just about anything on this radio, fr sky, uh, futaba uh, even even like hub sand, radios or even like wl toys, drones, which is kind of crazy, but i like that they also have the anodized faceplate kits i'll. Try to put some links down there below for that one. They sent me red and again i'd like to to get a hold of the gold one, but i'd have to replace all this myself, but this is nice. The max version comes with all this stuff. Pre installed now there are some major differences of this radio. Now, first off all the switches on here we've got the same switch layouts like i talked about before you have your two position switch up here, which is s f. You have s e right here: that's a three position: that's a three position: sb three position: we have sc three position: sd three position and sg three position and sh up here at the very top. This is a momentary, switch and what's cool about this radio. For the switches as far as i'm concerned, i love it because they have it clearly labeled some of the other radios out there. In the past, you had to look on the display panel and find out which one was se or sf.
You also have s1 here for a dial switch here s2. Here we have two other switches on the side ls, and this is not really a switch. This is a dial we want to do gimbal control and we have rs on this side right here and i believe the antin is also removable up top. We have some pretty cool functions up top for our trainer port, that is, the dsc port right there and a usb port for firmware updates and in the very bottom speaking of firmware updates. We have a really nice panel down here, that's a long panel and it's, an external sd card slot, which is nice. The sd card has your firmware on there. It has all your different folders for adding lua scripts, your crossfire information and your open tx firmware on there. So we also have a charge port here and it does have voltage protection on there, so it will charge your internal 18650 batteries. Those are not included by the way. You also have two uart ports on the very bottom, which is cool. This is aux 1 and aux 2 right here for the uart ports and what's neat about uart ports is, if you don't know you can update external receiver firmware, which is kind of nice. You can also add a bluetooth module for doing any type of buddy box setup if you want to which is also pretty cool so bluetooth instead of having a wire going over to the next radio – and i like that, that's kind of that long – easy to get To sort of rubber flap right there for access to your sd card instead of in the battery bay.
Now, on the radio king model, that is inside the battery bay and the battery hatch comes off just like this you've got a little foam plate here to push these 18650s down, and these are lion. Batteries most guys are using lion batteries now in the hobby they plug. In with this little 2s port. You can also use a lipo but make sure you don't use anything over a 2s lipo. It does not have a voltage protector on there, which maybe in the future, i would like to see some of these radios include a voltage protection unit on the power up source. It would be nice because, if you plugged in a 3s battery on this, it will fry or damage this radio, so be very careful that you don't do that. They also don't recommend using life batteries because they charge up per cell more than this radio can handle and it will damage it. So you want to make sure that you have lion batteries that charge around the 3.7 volt option, not up past 4.2 volts because it will damage the radio and you can put a much larger style lion battery in here as well. All the way up to those 21 000 style batteries i'll try to put a link down below for those but um you might have to solder up your own. Now i got the mode 2 transmitter here, meaning throttle on the left hand, side that's, the u.
s north american standard, which a lot of us fly for fpv, but if you're somewhere in the world – and you need to order a mode 1 or there's only mode one. In stock, if you're in the us – and you want it to be mode two – there is a way to change this radio physically and inside the system, software to be mode one or mode. Two, and the way you do that, is you take off these two panels? Right here remove the back plate. There are only phillips head screws holding the back plate on once you get inside the radio. You have four bolts holding on each of these gimbals take off those four bolts, unplug the power connector and swap these two gimbals and it'll put your throttle over here on this side to make it mode one or on this side to make it mode two. You can also adjust the tension for the springs inside here. So, if you like a looser stick, you can do that inside the radio as well, but also inside the system menu. You have to go in the system menu as well in the telemetry settings and change it to mode one or mode two, so that's inside the radio system settings to change it, one mode, one or mode. Two now also on this radio there's a sticker on the very bottom that tells you your voltage range. If it gets down to 6.6 or lower, it will beep and let you know it might also give you haptic feedback like a vibration on the radio while you're flying or say battery level low, if it's too high past 8.
4 volts that's the max on here, it's, Not going to tell you it might actually fry this radio so again be super careful and do not add a 3s battery into this radio which again might be hard to do because you only have a 2s plug in here. But i know you guys are kind of crafty, so just be careful when you're powering this radio not to go over 8.4 volt. Now one other thing that's great about this radio is, it is running the current version of open tx on here. It also has the option to be upgraded to the touchscreen version of open tx nightly firmware. If you want to download that and install the touchscreen, this radio has the option for that. You can upgrade this to a touch screen later so it's kind of future proof. If you want it now, we're going to go ahead and press the power button, this is a single button on and i'm just going to push and hold it and you'll see a blue light and the screen start up here. The screen is quite bright, which is kind of nice and there's. My just example quad there right away, though we have the battery telemetry there for my voltage. It shows me a sort of an icon display. It gives us our power source there or our signal source we've got the date over here october 19th. It looks like my my time could be changed, but you can also go into the system and change up all this, and you can change up all the entire layout here on this radio, which is super cool.
It also has a momentary, backlit dim display on here years ago. I had the fr sky x10 s, that one stayed on all the time and the the radio actually the battery drained quite quick, so that was kind of annoying, but we have a timer display here. We have all of our trim buttons here that are located as displays here, so i can go up and down on my throttle, amount you'll, see it go up and down and we're going to change this timeout, this backlight timeout real quick. You can also change the icon of your model, so if you want to take a picture of your quad and put it on the micro sd card here in the pictures folder you can make your own quad or plane or whatever you're, flying or driving here on The screen for that particular model it's kind of nice. It also shows me the telemetry for where my stick is at down here in this display, which is cool, and i also recommend calibrating the sticks on this transmitter before you use it. For the first time it is inside the telemetry menu. We can go in there and show you that in just a minute, but when you're calibrating these particular sticks, you don't do it in a circular fashion. You actually do it straight across and up and down. So as straight across and up and down as you can get it while you're calibrating other radios out, there always tend to go in a circle or the opposite way.
But this one is straight up and down and then left and right for stick calibration. Let'S go ahead and go into the system menu now, and the first thing we see is crossfire folder here and a few other folders with spectrum multi channel channel namer. You also have a spectrum analyzer on this radio, which is super cool. If you hit page it'll, take you over to the next tab, you can see this next. Tab is for the microsd card, which has my crossfire folder. My firmware my current firmware logs models, radio and the cool thing is as big as your sd card is. You can have as many models as you want. There'S my open tx sd card version right there and we can check that in the info all the way at the end there and we're gon na go to the next one radio setup. This is where i can change the date and time my battery meter range. Is there my volume, the beep length haptic, all that good stuff is in here rssi on shutdown, the brightness? We can also change the backlight right now. It has module mode on duration, 10 seconds we're, going to up that, because it kept kind of timing out on me and going dark on us, so we're just going to make that way up there and the brightness will turn that up for a sec. You go all the way to the right on off alarm gps alarm, so it also can do mode alarms.
So if you fly long range or inav, you can have this radio tell you current status like altitude or it what mode you're in, and you can automate a lot of things on this radio, which is really cool so down at the very bottom here. Let'S see if we get all the way to the bottom. This is where we can go in and change our channel flight mode order a lot of times. I leave it to aetr. That is pretty much the standard inside betaflight, so that is aileron elevator throttle and rudder and that's channel one. Two three and four past channel four you're gon na have your mode switches on five, six and seven, and just below that we have mode two. You can go in here after you switch these gimbals physically around, and this is where you make it mode one. You just click on that change it to mode one and they're in mode one. They also have mode three. It looks like mode four mode, one. Two three four we're just going to leave that on mode two for mine and that's rudder, throttle rate elevator and aileron. Now we can go back out by pressing return up at the very top that'll. Take us all the way back out now. If you want to go to the model menu, if i want to go in here and change some things around or i want to bind up a quad, you can change the name of the quad there.
You can change the model image so let's do that. Just real quick just for fun here, we'll see if they have any other models in here and we have a few different ones in here. We'Re, just going to change this to vanquish and we'll, see what that is now we're going to go, return, go all the way back out and it's an airplane so, depending on what the name of your file is that's, how you select and change the model, which Is kind of nice and we'll choose test one? There we'll see what that is that's another plane but i'm not going to worry about it. Who knows what they named that vortex? It was the original vortex from immersion rc, now we're going to go back into model menu, and this is where you bind up your quad at the very bottom. You want to have it on d16, if you're, using that super popular xm plus d16. You can also do d8 protocol for fr sky, but what's neat about this radio is. It is a 401 multi protocol, so um we're gon na go return back there and to change the mode that you're in you just click on this and look at all these different protocols. In here we have a ton of them. High tech hubsan. I mean the list goes on and on over 40 different protocols are in here, including dsm, spectrum futaba, traxxas it's insane, while cara pubs and wl toys all kinds of different.
This list just goes on and on and on it's just crazy. I love these radios now. We'Ll, go all the way back over to fr sky we'll, leave it right there and that's. Fine we'll go return back and whenever you set up a model, it's always important to set up your fail, safe. The fail safe's not set right now, but the way i do it is, i set it to no pulses. So that means that when my quad loses signal the quad quad's going to drop to the ground, it's important you set that up. Otherwise, it could fly off at the last known throttle input, so you could have a fly away, so you want it to definitely drop to the ground and have no pulses. No pulses means that it's not getting any reception or receiving any type of information from the receiver to the radio, and that would be no pulses. So if you page over, you can go to the heli setup. If you want to set up any type of heli on here, you can do that page over one more time for your flight modes and down here is the inputs and outputs right there or the mixes let's go all the way back over to the inputs and, If you long press the wheel, you will get to this page, and if this is important for adding a switch, you can click on the source there, and this is usually my arm switch right here.
So i'll select that and you see it automatically, selects it now. I can go return and now it's set to sf if you're looking to reverse a servo channel it's interesting because they call it weight. You would never figure this out if you didn't watch this video or you're just trying to tinker around and figure it out or if you didn't read the manual. But this is the way to start change a servo if you're flying airplanes – and you have something that you want to reverse that's the way you do that just use the jog wheel and now i'm going to go back to 100 weight there and now i'm, going To go back again and now i've added a switch and when you're in betaflight you'll see that it's now active. Otherwise, you won't see your switches working until you do this now. The next switch will click on the source there and that will make that se and the next switch down, usually my beeper switch. I put my beeper switch over here on sc, so i have my arm switch. My mode switch and my beeper switch here on sc and it looks like it's selected ailer on there. Somehow so we'll go ahead and do that again and i'll go out and now sc is my beeper switch. So we have s f s e and s c right there. Now, if we press page again, you go over to the mixes there and you can change those up.
We can also go down here and change these to be switches and again i'm going to make that consistent with what i have on that previous menu now i'm. Going to go back and click on that again hold down long press will get you into this menu, so the next one is se i'm gon na change that to se now i'm gon na go back out and channel seven there, the next one we're going to Make my beeper switch again to be consistent with the other menu, so that's sc, now that's set and i'm just going to remove sd because i'm, not using that one. You can delete it. If you want to go down here and just take that off, if you're not using it, you can do that and then you can go back to the page, outputs, curves, global variables, logical switches, special functions, custom scripts for lua scripting, which is kind of cool here, And the telemetry screen for rssi all your info there and let's just go ahead and go back into the telemetry screen again. This is where you can change around the main view layout. You can set up different widgets. You can change the color if you page over it'll, give you a bunch of different main view. You can also change themes and you can change the main background color, which is kind of cool right now. I have it set to red i'm going to leave it.
A red because it matches all my anodized aluminum there and i kind of like that now we'll go back into the system menu and i just want to check what version of the open tx protocol is on here. Firmware – and it looks like june 2014 is on here so that's fairly recent. It has all my options in there for multi module, support and crossfire. So, honestly, i could probably keep going on and on and talk about this radio until the end of the day, but um yeah. I i want to just go ahead and summarize this for you guys, because i know that a lot of you guys out there watch my channel to find out what's going to be reliable and something that you can trust when you buy it. So radio master is not a new company. A lot of people are buying this radio. Over top of the jumper t16. I had the jumper, and i had some switches fail on it and they've sort of made a fix. As far as some of the switch problems with this radio versus a jumper radio, so one nice thing about these switches is that they are replaceable, but the nicest thing about it is that it has a five pin jst plug on here. So you don't have to solder on a new switch. The three wires go to a little jst connector and plug in. So if you open up the back of the radio, if you ever drop this radio and you break the switch i'll, try to put some links down below and you can replace these switches, so that's that's, pretty cool and i think it's cool that they also added.
Some optional side bling here with the leather i've, never seen that before that's, pretty innovative by radio master, the new color interface anodized aluminum options is just off the hook, that's. What a lot of us want for customization. I think it would also be cool if they will offer the engraving service to get your fpv pilot name on there. I think that would be super dope for you guys that would be a pretty cool one. Other thing that i did mention about this radio that's, not a super big deal, but you can see it on the screen right. There is that we have one through six little chicken feet right there. Those are flight modes for inav. If you decide to use inaf. So this radio is crazy um you can get it in like five different versions of it. I'Ll try to put links down below for each one um from the budget, radio that they offer that's around the same price as the radio king. You might as well get that one um and this one is the full blown version like the max version that banggood calls it, and this one's coming in at around 250 um and i'm, not expecting that price to increase. So you guys should be safe there. But if you're, looking for all the bells and whistles all the aluminum parts and everything like that and the full blown multi protocol module in here with everything on board and crossfire support, this is definitely the one to get um and also great, no speaker static.
Here. It sounds good, so all my beeps and and voice prompts and everything sound great great labeling on the switches extended kickstand replaceable antenna usb charge port with an over voltage protection in there for charging our 18650s and the optional two uart modules on the bottom are also Nice for adding bluetooth, support or – and you can even do antenna tracking with those uarts as well. So if you're doing long range antenna tracking, you want your antenna to move with the signal.
