Will replacing the earpads with Peltor hy80 gellpads void the warranty?

[Critterhunter]

Thanks. I don't have an account there, so I think I'll let it ride. Just wish people knew he's risking cooking the voltage regulator with a 4 cell pack and it isn't going to increase performance one bit over a 3 cell, unless he's somehow bypassing the regulator to feed extra voltage to the board or something, but I would figure that would be an impossibility because the board is designed to run stable on a specific set voltage that never changes.

That charger and lipo brand name are also way more expensive then need be. Paying for the name more than anything. Lipos rule the RC world and hardly anybody dabbles with Thunderpower or Triton anymore due to way less expensive options out there if you know where to look. Thunderpower was just about the first brand name in lipos for RC planes. They do make a good product and deserve the reputation, but these days you can get a lipo that will work just as well for about 1/6th the price, unless Thunderpower has lowered their prices in the last couple of years from what they've always been before. Same deal with the charger. So many excellent less expensive options out there now then there were back in the day when Triton ruled the roost.

 

[Critterhunter]

By the way, did you notice the funky balance plug connectors for charging the Thunderpowers? I think they use a non-standard special plug, where as all other lipos are using various sized Molex plugs depending on the cell count. That's why there is a funky board hanging off the charger in those pics, where as most lipo chargers have several sizes (depending on the # of pins) Molex plugs built right into the side of the charger for whatever cell count the pack is to plug into. I seem to remember a lot of people complaining about hard to find charging plugs for I think the Thunderpowers back in the day 4 or 5 years ago, so that's probably the deal there with external charging ports on that setup. For that reason alone even if the Thunderpowers were reasonably priced these days I wouldn't buy those packs, because then I'd have to build adaptors for the standard Molex plugs on my 3 lipo chargers just to charge the things. Why they'd want to use special "Thunderpower" charging plugs on their batteries just doesn't make sense to me. It's like Sony Beta Max all over again. Everybody else uses the Molex standard for their balance charging plugs, and either JST small plugs or Deans Ultras for the power lead.

 

[Critterhunter]

Your friend is correct, the blue have a better audio quality. The differences in the two are, the Blues, the Piezo Buzzer is, I think, 32mm, and the Yellows are close to a 50mm. Several other factors in the design, the mounting plate on each buzzer is different design and material, and the old blues have a space at the top and bottom where the audio pressure is allow to escape from behind, to your ears, like a bass reflex speaker. One of the big factors, I guess would be the material each is mounted on, very hard to match the old blues......

OBN, got a point about the yellow headphones I just tried yesterday on an new Excal a friend just picked up below, but wanted to say this first...

While I've used my friend's Excal 800 with the blue headphones here and there in the past (like land hunting a bit before I got my GT), my other friend with a new Excal 1000 with the yellow headphones yesterday was complaining the machine seemed to get real unstable on him several times like super bad EMI. He's had this issue a few times over the last week or so. So anyway, when it happened again yesterday he was saying it was running real unstable and targets were getting real choppy on him, so I tried the machine out a bit to see if the instability was still there.

He had the sensitivity way high on it and I told him I'm only running it at about 3PM at this mineralized beach with my GT yesterday as we hunted, so I suspected he might be just running sensitivity way too high causing the instability and the chopper target hits, and I dropped it down to roughly 3PM like I had on my GT.

I went into the water with it and hunting around for a few minutes and it seemed smooth as silk to me, so I'm hoping it was just the sensitivity thing. He's new to the Minelabs so I think he thinks he needs to crank sensitivity high like on other non-Minelabs he owns to get any kind of depth out of them. Might be an issue with the machine that comes and goes but I'm going to guess it was just the sensitivity being turned up too much. Gave him a few tips on turning it down until the threshold doesn't drop out too much and he seemed fine with it the rest of the day.

Anyway, whole point being- Used those yellow headphones for the first time on this new machine. WOW! Sounds like audio out of a tin can. No wonder ditching those headphones for others once the warranty runs out is so popular. Is there much benefit to replacing the blue headphones on Excals too or not?