If you fly alone or in small groups, then there is absolutely no point spending so much money on VTX’s with fancy names. I recently tested the Eachine TX805, and I think it’s one of the best value VTX’s you can get in 2019.

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Buyer’s Guide: How to choose VTX for mini quad?

Where to Buy?

• AliExpress: https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DDjctY1
• Banggood: http://bit.ly/2UaVBPX

Update (30 Mar 2019): it’s currently on sale, price dropped from $17 to $12.59 (from the China warehouse only). If you are getting it from the US warehouse, use this coupon for $3.5 off, d65ba4)

Features and Specs

The TS805’s got everything you need in a VTX!

• Built-in microphone for audio (you can listen to motor noise)
• SmartAudio for VTX control
• User-friendly LED panels and push button
• 25mW, 200mW, 600mW and 800mW selectable output power (BUT really it doesn’t do 800mW, see my testing below)
• Solder pads – no stupid connector
• Can be mounted in FC stack (30.5mm)
• MMCX connector!
• Supports Pitmode

Specification:

• Input Voltage: 7V to 24V (2S to 5S)
• 40 channels, 5 bands (ABEFR)
• 5V output for FPV camera
• Dimension: 36mm x 22mm x 5mm
• Weight: 8.1g with wires

It comes with a manual, a dipole antenna with MMCX connector, and a MMCX to SMA pigtail (or RP-SMA, according to your choice).

The antenna is about 7cm long, while the MMCX to SMA adapter is about 10cm long.

Closer Look at the Eachine TX805 VTX

The Eachine TX805 VTX already comes with wires harness soldered on. These are 30AWG wires and about 7cm long, I love the solder pads, makes it really easy to repair and build.

Build quality of the Eachine TS805 video transmitter is reasonably good. There are a few capacitors and a big inductor onboard for power filtering that help clean up noisy FPV video feed.

Another feature that I really like is that it can be mounted on top of the FC (30.5mm mounting pattern).

And finally, someone at Eachine knows how to design a user-friendly LED interface. It’s nothing sophisticated, they just use different groups of LED’s to indicate channel, band and power. Very straight-forward and easy to understand. One push button for selecting and switching between these settings.

Here is the manual explaining how it works.

There is a small bug though.

When you enter band or power mode, it won’t come out of it. Normally you would expect it to come back to channel mode after leaving it for a few seconds. But it will just stay in band or power mode until you restart the VTX (power cycle).

Output Power Testing

When it comes to power output, I am super excited that the TX805 did extremely well in the 25mW and 200mW testing. These are the power levels I mostly use personally.

However it only gave half of the specified power on 600mW and 800mW. Maybe they labelled it wrong, should have been 300mW and 400mW :)

I really don’t think that’s a deal breaker anyway. 200mW is really all you need on a mini quad for flying around. Using this FPV range calculator, you can see 200mW VTX can easily provide 1Km to 2Km of range with the help of a good directional antenna. This should out-range most of our 2.4GHz radio links!

To use higher power, like 600mW, you really should use heatsink to keep the VTX cool, otherwise output power is just going to drop due to overheat. That’s why I don’t recommend running high power on 5.8GHz VTX on a mini quad! If you are really going for long range, you should look at lower frequency like 1.3GHz.

If you really want a high power 5.8GHz VTX, the AKK ultimate VTX is by far the most powerful VTX I have tested, and it actually delivers what it claims to do!

So do I still recommend the Eachine TS805? YES! A great VTX for budget builds!