Binding a FrSky receiver to a FrSky transmitter is fairly straightforward. In my case I have a FrSky Taranis X7 Transmitter and a FrSky R-XSR receiver. First, go into your transmitter’s model list and create a new entry for your new drone.
Once you have a model created, highlight your new model and press the menu button on your transmitter to enter into the Model Setup menu. Go ahead and give your new model a name that will help you remember which drone it is paired to, and then scroll down to the “Mode” option. Once you are there you will see a few options related to receiver pairing:
- Mode
- Channel Range
- Receiver No.
- Failsafe Mode
Select D16 for your mode and then change the receiver no. to one that isn’t already in use by any of your other models. Once you have those selected, hit the [Bind] button. You might be prompted to choose between a few different channel/telemetry options, if you are, just select “Ch1-8 Telem ON”
At this point your transmitter should start chirping, indicating that it is in binding mode. Now comes the trickiest part of the whole process: with the drone battery disconnected you need to begin holding down the bind or “F/S” button on your receiver, and while pressing the button the whole time, connect your battery in order to power your receiver. This can be especially tricky if you don’t have anyone around to lend a hand, but it is possible!
Once your receiver is powered, give it a few seconds for the binding to succeed. Then, disconnect the battery and reconnect it without touching the bind button on your receiver. If binding was successful, there should now be a green light illuminated on your receiver, and depending on your transmitter, a display on your controller showing signal strength.
If everything is configured properly, the process should be very quick. But if you have tried multiple times with no luck, it might not be your fault! Check out my post on Binding issues and how I fixed them for a possible fix.
Initial Model Configuration
Your transmitter has a few very useful functions available to enhance your flight experience and customize what your switches do. Below is a list of available options for a model programmed into the Taranis QX7. Here is the full transmitter manual if you would like to dive deeper.
- Model name: Enter your model name using the rotary dial and pressing in the dial (“ENTER”) to confirm your selection. You can switch between capital and lowercase letters by holding down “ENTER”.
- Timer1:
- OFF: this would tell the radio how flight timer1 should be treated. It can have many ways to launch and to stop it. But I would show you how to make it run when your model is armed. For now, just set the “00:00” field for any time you like. And leave it like this.
- Name: you can mane your timer
- Persist: whether this timer would be persistent or not. Set it to OFF for now.
- Minute: whether to enable minute notification or not
- Countdown: whether to enable voice, beeps, haptic timer countdown or not
- Timer2 and Timer3: Same as Timer1. You can set Timer2 to be persistent, with silent countdown, without minute call. Which would be useful to show a second timer on the flight screen that would represent the model total flight time.
- E.Limits, E.trims, Show trims, Trim Step: leave these on their default settings.
- Throttle settings:
- T-reverse: whether to reverse Throttle input or not
- T-source: leave on default setting
- T-trim: leave on default setting
- Preflight checks:
- Checklist: you can have a .txt file on your SD card to be shown on the screen of the radio every time you select the model.Preflight checks ->
- T-warning: whether to warn about Throttle not idle or not
- S-warnings: set the default switch position (“0” represents the current switch state. 0 – from you or upper position, 1 – center, 2 – towards you or down position). Any switch position other than stated would result in a warning upon model selection or radio ON. To set the default switch positions – physically set all switches to their desired positions, navigate to “<” sign and long press “ENTER”.
- Pot warn: Similar to default switch positions but refers to the potentiometers on the transmitter.
- Ctr Beep: whether to make a beep when passing central point of the input. You can highlight any of those inputs.
- Glob.Funcs: whether to use global functions for this model or not. There’s no harm in leaving it active (checked). Steps to create global functions can be found in the transmitter manual.
- Internal RF:
- Mode: this is the mode your in-build XJT module would work at. D16 – for all X-series, SBUS and telemetry equipped receivers (set it to this option for now). D8 – all V8II and D-series older nontelemetry and telemetry receivers. LR12 – for long range L-series receivers. OFF – means that module would not work. This is useful in case if you use this radio to control PC simulators.
- Ch.Range: how many channels to broadcast. For F3 flightboards it is enough to have 10 channels. CH 1-10.
- Rx.Num: RX unique identity number. Every model in your radio should have its unique id.
- Bnd: press to start BIND procedure. Which is the process described at the top of this page.
- Rng: press to start RANGE CHECK procedure.
- FailSafe: here you can set outputs for FS state. For F3 boards (since it has its own FS state) it should be set to “NO PULSES”. But for other models you would have to set some FS channel positions manually or to “HOLD” last position.
- External RF: this is for the external radio module that you can use in the JR-type bay. Same as above but with some changes in MODE: it could be also PPM or other types of communications between your radio and external module. Depends on the module you use and the type of communication it needs to work correctly.
Input Configuration
Next up is configuring what switches get marked as what signals, so you can then set the corresponding action later in Betaflight (Arming, Changing flight modes, etc). First, press “PAGE” several times to get to “MIXER” screen (page 6/13):
The transmitter manual again does a good job explaining things, but below is the section of interest re-written to highlight the most important details.
The MIXER screen is extremely important. Whenever you want to make any changes to channel assignments – you will have to create or edit the corresponding channel on this MIXER page.
There should be 4 channels already present for the stick inputs on your transmitter: the Aileron, Elevator, Throttle and Rudder controls:
The transmitter interprets what is being shown on the display as follows: Let’s take the first line: CH1 of the receiver would receive 100% (full range) of Aileron stick input. You can interpret all other 3 channels similarly but with the corresponding stick inputs. There’s much more you can (and should) do with your transmitter inputs though, first and foremost you’ll need to configure which input corresponds to your ARM/DISARM state. And then some other useful features are FlightMode selection, Beeper activation, PID tuning activation, and PID tuning input.
Adding ARM/DISARM
Let’s add this control to CH5. Using the rotary dial Highlight CH5 and press “ENTER” to go inside the channel configuration. We’ll only edit two of the options for now:
- Name: Name the channel however you’d like, but having it be something useful is always nice, e.g. “Arm”
- Source: The switch you’d like to be your ARM toggle. First press ENTER and while the field is flashing go ahead and flip the switch you’d like to use (I recommend using a two position switch for the ARM function, it doesn’t really matter aside from you wouldn’t want to waste a three position switch if your transmitter config eventually gets pretty intense). The field on the display should change to the switch you just actuated. Press ENTER again to confirm.
Afterward your channel setup should look something like this (but with your chosen switch instead of “SF”):
Which should look like this back in the MIXER page:
And like the other channels, the transmitter interprets this as: CH5 of the receiver would receive 100% (full range) of SF switch input (-100 (negative endpoint) signal at SF switch at down (far from you) position and +100 (positive endpoint) signal at SF switch at up (close to you) position). Don’t worry If this doesn’t mean anything to you, it will make more sense once you start configuring your input channels in Betaflight.
Adding Flight Mode Selection
Now that you’ve added your CH5 for ARM/DISARM, this should be a breeze. The process is nearly identical but this time we’ll set up CH6 and obviously change the channel name during creation.
One thing that you could switch up here is your switch selection. Depending on how many flight modes you want to have available to choose from, you could customize how you handle the mode selection. For example, if you’d like to be able to choose from 3 modes (Level, Horizon, Acro) you could do what I do and have one switch dedicated to the Level->Acro mode change, and one switch dedicated to Level->Horizon. Where I have Level as the default mode, and I have the horizon switch override the Acro switch, so basically I have to really want to go into Acro mode before the drone actually switches over. Or you could have a three position switch toggle between the three modes, which at first does seem much more intuitive, but I think would lead to more accidental mode switches.
The channel setup will be the same no matter which switch you end up selecting, the differences will be later in the Betaflight configuration. And like I said, the channel setup is just as in the ARM setup:
Using the rotary dial Highlight CH6 and press “ENTER” to go inside the channel configuration:
- Name: Name the channel however you’d like, but having it be something useful is always nice, e.g. “FM” or “Mode”
- Source: The switch you selected. First press ENTER and while the field is flashing go ahead and flip the switch you’d like to use. The field on the display should change to the switch you just actuated. Press ENTER again to confirm.
And then your MIXER page should look something like this:
Adding additional channels is pretty similar to these two, and if you’d like guidance for the functions I mentioned earlier (Beeper activation, PID tuning activation, and PID tuning input), there are steps written out in the transmitter manual.
Betaflight Configuration
Now that you have your ARM and Flight Mode Channels set up, lets get to the exciting part of testing your motors and switches in the
Read my Betaflight Configuration Guide
