One more innovation in Electra is actually at the transmitter end.

I wanted the flipper to be operated by a button rather than a joystick lever. Electra's transmitter, a Futaba Skysport 6 is a six channel transmitter. Channel 5 is an on/off signal, and that's what I wanted to use.

My feeling was that an on/off signal would always operate the flipper faster than a joystick lever, which moves through all the available positions rather than going straight to the end.

Unfortunately a six channel receiver is much heavier and bigger than a four channel one and the Skysport's first four channels are all joystick controlled.

By chance I discovered that the servo reverse dipswitch would flick the flipper from down to up just as fast as I liked, and it would move the servo a greater angle than a normally set up transmitter/servo combination would.

I didn't want to be fiddling around with the dipswitches during a battle so I soldered two leads from the channel three internal dipswitch points and attached them to an external sprung push switch.

In later models of Electra, I reverted to using channel three of the transmitter and got a similar range of movement by setting the "dual rate" of the transmitter to maximum.