Falconry World

The other day I was asked a question regarding the best batteries to use in Marshall transmitters. There’s a few points to remember when buying and using battery transmitters, and I thought it might be useful to post my reply here.

When using a battery for a falconry transmitter, always take the old battery out and leave it a minute before putting in a new one. Alternatively, place a battery in the wrong way around to reset the falconry transmitter memory. This procedure causes no harm, and has to be done on all Marhsall Radio Powermax transmitters as a matter of course due to the nature that some power is still present in the transmitter after a battery has been taken out.

If you check the voltage on a RT+ battery, from many manufactures you’ll find that if you put a meter over them they are 3.0v dead on. However, higher end batteries such as Duracell will be 3.35v or more. This does no harm to a transmitter and these higher grade batteries also give power for longer at any voltage. The Marshall transmitter has three warning systems.

1) First is a timer “The Apollo 13″ mode which will make the length of the pulse shorter and the time between each pulse you hear longer after a transmitter has been left on for over 24hrs. The transmitter presumes that if it’s not been turned off the bird is lost and so will save energy to maximise battery life.

2)The double bleep is set to trigger at a certain voltage when the transmitter is under load and drops below a certain voltage. A battery may show on a meter as being 3v however under load i.e. giving out a radio wave the battery will drop to below 2.5v which will cause the transmitter to give a double bleep to warn you to change the transmitter. The Marshall transmitters do not lose strength of signal like most transmitters as the voltage goes down due to some rather clever jiggery pokery that Dave Marshall worked out. Most transmitters will give a weaker and weaker signal like a dimming torch as the battery drains. Marshall transmitters do not do that.

3)The magnet takes no more power up to use. However, a safety feature is that your transmitter won’t turn on or off using the magnet if the battery is low, and the battery should be changed.

Marshall sell all batteries as near cost as possible, the best transmitters in the world is no use if its engine (the battery) is ****. So all batteries on the Marshall web site are well below rrp.

I know in the past falconers had to pay a lot for batteries from certain retailers and it was a real gripe of mine as well. However, Marshall now give away a battery with every transmitter sold and sell them as cheap as possible to encourage falconers to use quality batteries.

One more thing because I’ve done myself in the past, keep all batteries in a protective container individually. If two batteries come into contact with another they will short out and kill the battery. And don’t keep them in with other metal objects like one fella who wondered why his batteries were dead after he took them out of the plastic pack and put them altogether with his spent rim fire cases.

One for micro transmitter users, the battery they should use is the 1225 and not the 1220. The 1220 fits but doesn’t last as long and is the same price as the slightly larger 1225.