Battery Connector Soup

 (Originally Published July 22, 2022)

Battery connectors are an enduring frustration for many. BnF type aircraft come with a variety of connectors depending on the source, batteries and chargers are the same.

For the last couple of years, I've been standardizing my fleet on XT series connectors. However I'm coming to the realization that this doesn't work as well as I'd like overall. I still mostly have electrics even with my increasing interest in glow, and I expect I'll continue to fly electrics long-term, at least for smaller stuff. I may or may not convert my 2 60-ish sized electrics to glow at some point.

All my small stuff except actual UMX's is on XT30. This works fine.
My larger 3S stuff is a mix of XT60 and iC3 batteries and iC3 ESC connectors (all Avian ESC's)
My 4S stuff is a mix of iC3 and XT60 at the aircraft.

The challenge is that I don't buy batteries mail-order, only in my LHS's. I'm having trouble finding mid-sized 4S packs (larger than 2200 and smaller than 5000's) from brands other than Spektrum locally. 

The takeaway? I'm going to standardize on iC3 for larger 3S, I only really need 4x 2200's right now and have 2 iC3 ones, so I'll get 2 more and retire all the other old batteries via Swap meet.

For 4S, I'm going to start standardizing on iC3 as well, but I'll convert my current batteries to iC3 as they're newer, higher performance batteries.

On the charger side, I'll look at getting an S2100 or S2200, then maybe replacing my iSDT D2mII with a second S2x00. I'll also get the Spektrum battery checker to supplement my iSDT one (I'll keep the iSDT for the SBus/PWM checker feature, the Spektrum replaces that with a Servo test feature that's equally useful)