So I decided to just buy something new to play with a bit. I picked up one of the taranis X7's, bought their NIMH pack (just for ease, it will be replaced with lithium in the not too distant future) as well as some other toys I always wanted to play with (Serial Bus decoders and the XM+ receiver) First onto the TX. For slightly more than a C note, probably the most capable thing you can buy in the price range. it is not without its faults however. Once you manage to extract the dry cell carrier to put in the rechargable pack, it becomes apparent that they had not really considered what parts of a board should be exposed to the end user. see images below. easily covered with some plastic, but just something to be aware of. Use wise, if you have used any opentx transmitter you will be right at home. if you have not, it has a bit of a steep learning curve, but since that can be done on your computer (using the opentx companion), learning is straightforward. for me, I already had the boat set up in another opentx transmitter, so I simply had to get the latest companion version, copy over the model information into the new tx configuration, and upload it to the transmitter. basically worked straight up, but I will have to change a few switch assignments as the switch positions are different from the 9X series of transmitters. I have not tried the LUA scripting engine, but I installed it, just for fun. Next up, is my attempt to reduce or eliminate wiring in the boat. right now I have a bundle of 7 cables running from the RX to various points in the boat, clustered in groups of 4 (midship side, and 3x esc's) and 3 (stern side, sterns, rudder). What I picked up to try out is an XM+ receiver (a 16ch RX slightly bigger than a postage stamp) and several sbus to ppm decoders. this will let me run one line from the RX to the first block of 4 connections, then Y it to the stern 3 connections. you set the servo channel assignments in the decoders and the control signal runs along the single serial bus from the RX. the RX is absolutely tiny, and weighs nothing. All in all this will out a number of ounces from the ship and vastly simplify the wiring. Range check in the house is good, will have to see how it does pond side, but given the tiny RX size, I can put it higher up without issue, which will improve the signal over the current RX in the boat. All in all, a neat little setup and the price is definitely right. For under 200 bucks shipped I have the TX,TX battery, two receivers and 3 sbus decoders (One RX and one decoder for spare) and the small boards should lend themselves fairly well to waterproofing. There will be a bit of a learning curve for people not familiar with the opentx environment but once you get over that, it is spectacularly flexible and lets you do just about anything.
Unsure if you can bind multiple RXs to the same TX in the Frsky world but we do this alot in the giant scale aircraft to cleanup Spektrum installs. My 21' Cub was running 4 receivers!
with two modules you can run 2 RX's, but with only one module, only one RX simultaneously is allowed. the taranis has a built in frysky module and a spot for a secondary module from most anybody.
