Your New FPV Radio is Probably a Downgrade

We had a long chat with Painless360 the other day, which sent us down a bit of a rabbit hole. The question: why, after all these years, does the FrSky Taranis still feel... right? It seems manufacturers have been so busy adding features that they’ve forgotten how to make a radio that just works. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a design that respected your hands.

The secret wasn't magic, it was just common sense. Full-size gimbals, a switch layout that didn't require advanced finger-yoga, and—the main event—sliders. Actual, physical sliders for fine-tuning things without diving into a menu. Modern radios either bulk up into screen-obsessed behemoths or shrink into minimalist gamepads, sacrificing the very controls that made the Taranis a multi-discipline workhorse. Progress, apparently.

Our wishlist for a 'Taranis 2.0' is painfully simple. Keep the exact same form factor. Add a modern battery bay, built-in 1W ELRS, and slap EdgeTX on it. That's it. No, you can't have a giant colour screen that's impossible to see in sunlight. The goal is to fly things, not watch Netflix. You can see the full, exhaustive breakdown in our latest article.

Until some bright spark decides to actually listen to pilots, the original Taranis remains a surprisingly solid choice. If you want to hear Mads and Lee go on about it in more detail, we've conveniently dropped the video below. Give it a watch.