2 things I hate about TBS Mambo; 20 that I love (no-BS review)

the tbs tango 2 is a very good radio but not everybody likes the gamepad style ergonomics which is why people were so excited when rumors of this leaked the tbs mambo and what people wanted was everything about the tango 2 that they liked just in a different form factor but that's not what they got the tbs mambo comes with tbs tracer in it not tbs crossfire and that is leading some people to ask whether tbs is doing what's good for their customer or what's good for their bottom line i'm joshua bardwell and you're going to learn something today [Music] [Applause] [Music] the radio that you're going to see me using in this video was sent to me by tbs i did purchase a tbs mambo with my own money but then it was damaged in shipping and rather than delay the review tbs rushed me out one also newbie drone rushed me out one that's where i actually bought mine thank you to newbie drone and tbs for making it possible for me to get this review out as soon as i did i have not received any payment or other compensation in exchange for this review and nobody has had any uh preconditions on the contents of this video before it was released let's get the obvious stuff out of the way as quickly as possible and then get into the interesting stuff on the front of the radio we've got one two three four switches and each of them are three position switches and two potentiometers or knobs on top of the radio there are two switches that are flush with the outside of the radio the left one is a two position which you would probably use for arming and disarming and the right one is a momentary the mambo does have physical trim switches so for those of you who fly fixed wings you will be able to trim it out the usual way that was a really common okay not that common but for those who fly fixed wings that was a really deal breaker complaint about the tango 2. gimbals are hall effect gimbals so they should have really good durability compared to potentiometer gimbals but of course this is a new radio so we can't say that for sure they are the same design as the tango 2. here on the front of the menu are the standard open tx controls page menu and exit and there's a jog wheel with a clicky button on it the radio does run open tx what freedom tx we'll talk more about that and take a look at the interface in just a little bit the back of the radio has a standard jr module base you will be able to put any module in there that you prefer to get additional protocols that you might want to run the radio is powered from two 18650 cells the 18650 cells are not included with the radio you do need to supply them yourself and the radio does support internal charging of those cells via a usbc port down here on the lower left corner the firmware on the radio is freedom tx which is tbs's custom build of open tx so if we power the radio up welcome to mambo switch warning it's going to look really familiar to anybody who's ever used open tx or freedom tx we got a little channel monitor here we can page we can see yeah does this look familiar to you well if it's your first radio maybe you've never seen this stuff before but suffice it to say that it's going to be work exactly the same as any other open tx radio and that's really good because it means that all the tutorials out there that are made for free sky radios or radio master or jumper radios they're going to apply equally to this if i hold down the menu key it takes us to the tools menu and you can see that tbs agent light is pre-installed that's the that's a little lua script or program that's used to manage uh tvs hardware uh on freesky and radio master radios you have to install that yourself it's nice that they reinstall it for you now if this is your first open tx radio you may be wanting some tips on how to get it set up i've actually made a separate video about getting this setup out of the box i'll put a link to that down in the video description if you want to check it out now as i said earlier this radio runs freedom tx not open tx and that's a little bit of a problem although it's not tbs's fault that it's a problem you see any radio that runs open tx can be managed using a piece of software called opentx companion and that means that no matter what opentx radio you've got the process of updating firmware and backing up and restoring the radios models and settings is the same it also means that you can move your models and settings between opentx radios you want to switch from a free sky radio to a radio master all of your models and settings that you've worked so hard to set up can just be sucked off of the free sky and moved to the radio master but that doesn't work with freedom tx you can't there's no way that i know of to move models from like a radio master to a tango or to a mambo which are running freedom tx now the reason i say that's not tbs's fault is that freedom tx was always intended to be temporary that tbs would build freedom tx and develop the mom the tango 2 radio using freedom tx and then they would do a thing called a pull request and the open tx project would do a thing called a merge and freedom tx would just become a part of open tx and then this radio and this radio would run opentx but that hasn't happened and that hasn't happened due to some reluctance on the part of the open tx dev team and i don't know why it's they've taken them forever to do everything lately in fact the open tx dev team has been so slow to develop new features a whole new project has been created called edge tx which is supposed to be faster moving i got a video about what edge tx is and how you could try edge tx out if you're interested in doing that but the takeaway today is that these radios run freedom tx not open tx and that means that you cannot manage them with opentx companion like you can all other opentx radios and you cannot move models and settings from an opentx radio to these some people actually don't like open dx companion very much how do you update firmware and manage settings on these guys well you use tbs agent and tbs agent is actually or tbs agent x technically tbs agent x is a piece of software developed by tbs some people think it's easier to update firmware on these guys using tbs agent x than opentx companion and they're kind of happy if you're starting from scratch this distinction probably doesn't matter to you because you probably don't have anything to move over to the radio but if you are coming from an open tx radio that's going to be a little you're going to basically be starting from scratch by the way if you want to know more about updating firmware on these radios again i got a link down in the video description to a video showing you how to do it next let's talk about ergonomics and i think tbs usually does a very very good job with the ergonomics of their radio i am actually not a fan of gamepad style radios usually in part because i pinch my sticks rather than thumbing the sticks and i think gamepad style radios are usually worse for that and yet the tbs tango 2 is the best ergonomics of any gamepad style radio for pinching in my opinion now i've flown with the tbs mambo for several hours in the simulator that's one of the ways i test the ergonomics because you could just go for hours and hours in a simulator without having to actually set it down to go get your quad or anything and i've flown this with real quads and the ergonomics are pretty good uh it's not quite as large in your hands as a radio like the radio master tx16s and it's a little more rounded it's kind of good because when you put it in your bag it doesn't take up as much room in your bag it fits your hand really well these switches it's really easy to rest your fingers on these switches it's maybe a little easier than i'd like to accidentally press that if you're just kind of gripping or clutching whereas with like a standard three position switch well you can bump those two so i guess nothing's perfect but overall the ergonomics are very nice here on the back side there's a little bit of a ridge here to grip with your finger which really helps you get a hold on it there are some nice grippy pads here although they are not grip tape there is a another version of this radio the ethics version that among other things has grip tape we'll talk about that a little later but we've got these pads here and everything is easily accessible and where you would want it to be no problem with ergonomics a lot of people have asked about the gimbals of this radio so i've got it here next to my radiomaster tx16s and let's see i mean it's very hard to give a sense of the size and throw of the gimbals uh just by looking at them but this gives you a sense of the size and what i also want to show you is the throw and that's even harder because the gimbals on the mambo ship much shorter the sticks ship much shorter than the sticks on like the radio master let's see if i can somehow see that's the problem the radio master looks like it's uh shorter but it's only because it is actually deeper in can you see that it's it's very difficult to show but the here we go mambo about three quarters of an inch radiomaster uh closer to an inch now that that is not a problem because like basically all gimbals we can just spin these hello there we go got it loosened up we can just spin these and turn them out to whatever length we prefer and then there's a lock nut down here at the bottom right so that's no problem when i first got them and i was flying with them they were noticeably shorter and it actually took me some adjusting just to get used to the movement as far as the throw i just went and got this spectrum radio the spectrum gimbals they're probably the sort of standard long throw gimbals you can you can see how long it's been since i used it it's freaking dusty from sitting out on my counter but what if we did this oh yeah what if we did this so we put them all the way down and aim them straight at each other what had almost it almost looks like the mamba has a longer throw than the spectrum let's try it with the radio buster we're going to aim them straight at each other and brace the radios against each other and then trying without moving the radios okay so it does look like it looks to me like the mambo has less throw than the radio master but strangely more throw than the spectrum i would have thought the spectrum would be a large throw anyway that's i hope that's what you wanted to know about the gimbals um frankly i mean i feel like you just give me which give me what you got i'll learn to fly with it uh i do prefer the longer throw gimbals on most of my radios um i like i feel like the precision of the longer throw is desirable you get a little bit more resolution but i do i know that many people who especially people who are pinchers find it hard to kind of get all the way to full throttle see my thumb is basically fully extended now and it it doesn't feel as natural um depending on how you hold your hand so some people like the smaller throw this seems to be a little bit smaller throw than something like the radio master so then let's talk about the controversial decision that tbs made that may be more about their bottom line than it is about what's good for their customer i'm not sure i'm gonna i'm gonna just present the facts and you can decide for yourself what they did was they put tbs tracer in this radio instead of tbs crossfire and the reason people are annoyed about that some people are is that tbs tracer is still very new and a lot of people are flying crossfire and they're annoyed that they can't use the freaking internal module on the radio the brand new radio that they just bought they haven't got any tracer receivers they don't want tracer they got crossfire and tbs's response is bro you already own a crossfire module all you zillions of people out there you have a crossfire module put the crossfire module in the back of the radio and then you got the best of both worlds you got crossfire and you got tracer c we did you a favor the only person for whom that's not going to be true would be somebody who has the tango 2 and wants to go to the mambo that that person crossfire is built into the tango two so they don't have a module but for a lot of people who are coming from a third-party radio to tbs they already have a module so why make them buy it twice and there's some some validity to that argument but there's also certainly validity to people who are like well why can't i get it with crossfire built in i don't want tracer and we got to talk about the reasons why you might not want tracer the good thing about tracer is that it's 250 hertz update rate and it's very low latency so racers really love it but freestyle pilots love low latency too everybody can benefit from the more connected feel that low latency gives you i guess if you're a long range pilot flying hundreds of feet in the air not you're just amongst the clouds well then you don't care so much about latency but for a lot for a lot of people who are watching this latency is very beneficial the downside of tracer though is that the range is much much shorter if you look at like wesley vardy uh he does range tests and he got tracer out something like 29 kilometers at which point you might say well that's far more range than i need but that's like the ideal scenario with a fixed wing plane up in the air flying out you know with no obstacles in real world conditions a typical range for tbs tracer on its max output power might be a few kilometers maybe three to five kilometers again it all depends but if you are really wanting the most penetration through concrete bandage or the most range then you may be more interested in something like express os ghost or crossfire than tracer and it's really a shame that that's true because the hardware in this radio and every other tracer module has the ability to do uh what's called low raw long range modulation and that's what immersion rc ghost and express lrs both do and they have the exact same chipset that this radio does and they do both low raw modulation which gives you pretty good latency and amazing range as well as flrc modulation which is what tracer does which gives you really good latency and not quite as good a range and the complaint about tracer is that with a simple firmware update tbs could unlock the ability to do both lora and flrc best of both worlds you want latency use flrc you want range use lora and they haven't done that and it's hard to see why they haven't done that except that if tracer could do long range and low latency then there wouldn't be as much reason to buy a crossfire and this is pure speculation on my part but it almost feels like tbs is reluctant to compete with itself and is doing what's not as good for customers but that's a topic for another video so the mambo has tracer in it and if you like that that's great and if you don't like that put something in the external module bay which you may already have tbs made another confusing decision when they built this radio which is not going to be apparent until i open it up so let's open it up uh by the way one decision they made that i wholeheartedly agree with was to use hex head screws to hold the radio together good job i i hate it when they use phillips head screws and it's you're stripping them out well there's like six more screws i'd have to take out to get this board to come out to show you the front side of it so instead i'm just going to try and angle up in here and show you what i'm trying to show you these right here are the front switches of the radio and as you can see they are direct soldered to this pcb and that is true for all four of the front switches they are hard soldered not even like they're soldered to a daughter board which is then plugged in or something and that's annoying because a lot of people are going to break one of these switches that's not a commentary on the build quality of the switches they're the same freaking switches that every other radio uses i assume but no matter how like robust these switches might be someday someone is going to drop their radio and it's going to break a switch that just happens some percentage of the time and when it breaks it's not going to be fun to fix like obviously it's not the end of the world if you have to desolder a switch and solder one back down if you've got the tools and the skill but like even me who is like not a great solderer but like not a complete amateur without a hot air station the ability to desolder all three of these and float all three at the same time and then be able to lift the switch out it's easy to do if you have a hot air station but with just a soldering iron it's pretty challenging and it is very i've done this so many times where you're kind of pulling on it and you desolder one of them and it kind of starts to lift out and you decide to the second one and then you damage the pcb so this is a really confusing decision to hard solder something that's like 100 guaranteed to break in a fair number of cases and uh i don't know what tbs's plan is for this like they're just going to send people new boards it's a really weird decision well as long as we're here we can take a look at some of the other stuff that's on the inside of the radio uh you can see here a throttle lock screw and that is used to determine whether the vertical channel is auto centering or not you would change that if you were going to change the radio from mode 2 to mode 1 and you had to move the throttle over to the other side this screw and the other adjustment screws are not accessible from the outside of the radio so if you do need to adjust your gimbals you will be opening up the radio these right here this is the tensioner for the throttle and the ratchet for the throttle throttle does thankfully come not ratcheted although you can tighten this screw down if you want to get the ratcheting back and interestingly only one of the gimbals comes with these little metal sliders here usually the gimbals would both come with the sliders and just one of them would be disabled so if you did want to move the throttle from the left to the right you'd be taking out all three of these screws and moving this metal piece over to the other side not the end of the world right here is the internal antenna for the tracer unit and the range on this is fine for typical use especially if you're using tracer at its maximum one watt power however you can see here they do have a little knockout that you can drill through and there is a ufl connector on the other side here which can be used for an external antenna if you prefer to install one yourself and that will get you just a little more range than the internal antenna of course it's also a little bit more likely to be broken if it's in a bag or if it's dropped i just noticed this which looks like a pin out for a crossfire nano receiver and it suggests that there are thinking about a wireless buddy box function or some other it says student mode so obviously that suggests buddy box that's pretty cool haven't heard anything official about that but uh interesting and over here on the left side we've got the sd card here it's nicely taped in with captain tape to keep it from getting loose if you drop the radio or something and yeah so you can see after you pull this grip off you can access the sd card here you shouldn't normally need to access the sd card manually because you can access the sd card contents through the usb plug but sometimes it's faster or more convenient to pull that out or frankly the factory cards that come with most radios oftentimes they die and you have to replace them with your own card and this will be easy to do you won't have to open up the radio to do that we can't finish this review without also mentioning the ethics version of this radio the the standard version costs 140 the ethics version costs 190 dollars and for that fifty dollars more what do you get most of it is cosmetic upgrades to be honest um you get silica i don't have the ethics version which you have to use your imagination you get silicon switch covers the ethics version comes with a kickstand on the back uh and it has uh the knobs go to 11. it doesn't change the function of the knobs at all it's just a joke just to go to 11. finally the ethics radio comes with the tbs crown jewel stick ends and an ethics neck strap whether you feel like all those upgrades is worth the additional fifty dollars is really your call uh i do think that the lack of a kickstand is certainly noticeable i'm i had a kickstand on my taranis i really liked it i really like this folding metal kicks or not kickstand per se but just means you can set your radio down and i like having a handle on the back of the radio i have dropped my radio so many times being able to just kind of hook your hand through this is so useful and i really miss it every time i'm carrying this radio around without my neck strap on because you're just gonna you got your quad you got your battery and you just you fumble it it just happens so the kickstand a very worth worthwhile upgrade um of course all that stuff is available separately and perhaps it all adds up to more than 50 if you buy it all separately but maybe you don't want it all it's your call so that brings us to the end of the video and as always the question should you buy it and this is going to be a tricky one this radio costs 140 dollars and if you think about the fact that you can get a tbs tracer module for i think it's about 60 today that means that you're paying 80 for the whole rest of the radio what else is out there cost eighty dollars a jumper tea light the build quality and the capabilities of the jumper tea light are miles away from this if you've decided that tracer is for you and you want a regular standard style radio then the tbs mambo is a great choice the ergonomics are good the build quality is good it has enough switches it's an open tx radio so there's nothing to complain about there it's a good freaking radio the other person this radio might be right for is someone who has a bunch of crossfire models and a crossfire module that they can easily stick in the back of the radio 140 for this radio is still a pretty good deal even if you don't intend to use the tracer uh and just look at what else is out there even at the 140 price point there's not a lot that directly competes with this but if you are brand new and just getting into the hobby it's hard to know whether to recommend this radio because it's hard to know whether tracer is the right control link to recommend it might be i mean a lot of people get into rc with free sky and tracer is better than free sky in every freaking way so maybe this is a great radio for a beginner i mean you buy a radio master tx16s what do you get you get free sky and fly sky and spectrum you get crappy range maybe you could do worse if you've decided that this is the radio for you there are links down in the video description where you can buy it and they are affiliate links what that means is that whenever you click one of those links i get a small percentage of anything you buy at the store after you click the link so click the link you go buy a tbs mambo you go buy a tbs tango 2 you go buy anything just click the link fill up your cart check out and i get a small commission it's an easy way for you to support the channel just to click those links before you do your shopping doesn't cost you anything so what do you think of this radio it's a winner for you or did they miss the mark and would you like to see tbs unlock the lora version of tracer like why wouldn't you would you like to see express lrs on this radio let me know in your comments what your thoughts are i'd love to hear it uh that's gonna do it for now though thank you so much for watching and happy flying you guys i don't know where i am and i i don't know what's going to happen but if i don't make it out of this i just want to know that you subscribe to my channel or maybe join my patreon or or click one click one of these videos i picked out for you

Channel: Joshua Bardwell

Views: 13,612

Rating: 4.8911176 out of 5

Keywords: joshua bardwell, ultimate fpv shopping list, support me on patreon, This is my full time job

Id: iCjdW_PzmwU

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021