e-station BC-6

[DonutCity]

Ok, this charger really sounds nice and thanks to some really helpful people on this site I think it could be a good "fit" for my needs. I have a TREX 600e so my battery requirements seem to be a 4200-5000 mAh 6s battery. Will this particular charger work well with that size battery? My understanding is that the only other thing I'll have to do is decide on the balancing board I'll need for the brand battery I go with. Any suggestions are more than welcome - best of all exact setups for this size battery would be great.

[DonutCity]

Well, I bought this charger and a couple of Align 6S 4600mAh batteries and I'm trying to understand if during the charging process the balancing plug (with the adapter board) and the main leads from the battery need to be hooked up to the charger to charge correctly. Forgive the ignorance - I'm used to my Eflite heli's batteries that only require the balancing plug to be plugged into the charging units.

[Danimal]

Hi Donut
Sorry if it seems as though I've been ignoring you lately. But I have been following your posts and wanted to give everyone else a chance to give there input without my opinion making your decision any harder than it already was.
Anyway the answer your question is yes you have to have both the main lead and the balance tap plugged in to do a balance charge. The way I understand it is that the first part of the charging process is dun through the main lead up to about 95% capacity. Then the balance side takes over to balance out the cells and complete the charge. Make sure that before you start the charge process you go in to the user set program and set the capacity cut off to 4600 mAh to match your packs.

When you want to do a fast charge or a regular charge you don't need to use the balance tap. But I would recommend that you do balance charging the first few times. And don't push the new battery's to hard until you get them broke in a bit.

[DonutCity]

Oh, no sweat Danimal. As always, thanks for your help. Things are starting to make more sense. The "plug and play" RTF heli's don't really force you to learn why your doing what your doing. This build has been very educational thus far (hopefully it will actually fly one day...lol...)

[uneverno]

I've always charged using just the balance plug. Makes for a slow charge, but I rather prefer it that way. I'm in no hurry, nor are the batteries.

If the charger has a cycling function, I would run a couple cycles on the batteries before flying with them (provided you're patient enough ) to give the batteries a nice easy break in.

(hopefully it will actually fly one day...lol...)

Me too! Still need to make sure the swash is level. Though it eyeballs really nicely, the lhs didn't have a swash leveler last week so I can't measure it yet. Tonight I'll set up the throttle/pitch curves. I had an epiphany this afternoon at work, and suddenly, finally I understand how it works, how to use a pitch guage, and what I need to do to set it up. Still a little sketchy with the radio programming, but at least I get what I need to do with it once I find the right screens