XrcHobbys

The title says it all. I am young and have been collecting used Toy Grade Rc cars for parts and custom builds.
But one thing has been bothering me for some. Vintage toy Rc was simple. There was (Best to my knowledge) two main frequencies (27Mhz and 49Mhz). If you pick up a car with that frequencie, and have a remote of the same they will work together.
But then they introduced 2.4Ghz. I am not vary techy, but if I understand this allows each car to have its own channel with a remote. The thing is, no matter how many brand, remotes or cars I pick up (Jada, New Bright, etc.) will not work with each other.

So the question is, if I buy a Hobby grade 2.4 will it work with a toy grade car? And/or is there a universal remote for this sort of thing? I figured I would ask.

This is my first post on here. Thanks to all who respond!
Tristan.

suburban_hooligan

i think the Mhz of an AM radio depended on where you lived. all the AM radio's i had were ether 27Mhz or 75Mhz. aircraft may be different idk. and yeah those were easy. put the frequency crystal that matched the car and there was a good chance it would work.
the 2.4 digital stuff is still voodoo to me. there's also different types of 2.4 gig radios. you can't bind a Futaba radio to a Spectrum receiver and vis versa. i once found out that i couldn't connect my Futaba radio to an HPI receiver because the radio is FHSS and the receiver was S-FHSS.
that said, i think the only way you're going to get a 2.4 gig radio to work with a toy grade car is to somehow wire the hobby grade receiver into the board on the toy grade car. i have no idea how to do that. i actually don't know if it's fully possible.
your other option is to strip out the electrics in the toy grade car and replace it will hobby grade components. that iv done. i have an old Nikko High Roller Camaro monster truck that now has an old LRP esc, an old AM hobby grade radio, hobby grade servo, but still uses the stock toy grade motor. the car was already set up to use a 7.2v nicd/nimh battery so that part was easy. the only thing id be carefully about is that you don't feed the motor to much power. if the car is made to run on 4 AA batteries (6v) and you try using a 7.2v lithium battery the motor might not last very long.

XrcHobbys

Thank you for the reply. All your saying makes sense. Sadly, the whole reason I was asking was so I don't have to get new electronics.
Maybe some day someone will make a universal remote.
Thanks again and Best regards Tristan

SyCo_VeNoM

here is the thing back in the day the old toy RC's generally used a generic receiver chip that decoded the signal that was shared between brands. It just so happened that a lot of them shared the same configuration for the data. Also the controllers had to share the same frequency(or extremely close), and the RX's could still pick up TX's that were slightly different due to slop in the tuning of the circuit as they were analog. Also 27mhz, and 49 were set to the side for those applications so nothing else would interfere with them.

2.4ghz is a different beast though it needs to be paired up to handshake as there are a **** ton of devices that use the spectrum, and if they didn't do handshaking there is no way it could determine what data was for it. There is also different handshaking protocols, and no 2 are compatible.

But yea only way is like hooligan said you would have to swap the electronics. Trying to modify the board to listen to the RX is not feasible as you would need a full schematic of it, and have to figure out how to interface it so it can interpret the info from the new RX to the boards logic to control it
Way harder then finding a cheap radio, a servo, and cheap ESC, and figuring out how to fit it in. Which is way easier then it was years ago with the advent of the 3d printer revolution.

XrcHobbys

Yeah, that is what I thought. I still think it would be smart for someone to make a sort of digital remote that could scan for the deferent codes.
Anyway, thanks for the reply. This about answers my question's.