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(By Bill Pickl)
First off you need to decide how many channels you will need. A transport only needs two where as a battleship can need up to 7 proportional channels. A run down is as follows. 1) Throttle, 2) Rudder, 3) Fire primary weapons fore/aft, 4) Rotate forward guns, 5) Rotate aft guns, 6) Elevate main guns, 7) Fire secondary weapons port/starboard. From the above you can see that a fast maneuverable cruiser could get by with a 4 channel radio and a Battleship with six proportional channels. A word of caution most radios with 5 or more channels include one or more gear switches in their channel count. These are NOT proportional channels and would not be usable for any of the functions above except for a two position elevation control.
Must have features you will want to look for are: ground frequency availability (this can be waived at private pond locations), a servo reversing function and types of controls (you'll want a rotary knob for gun rotation). Nice to have features include servo end point adjustment and reconfigurable controls. Most other features are not applicable to rc warships so you'll never use them.
My favorite radio is currently the ACE Nautical Commander, but this will be out of production soon so may no longer be available. Next are HiTec's Prism radios, but talk to a sales rep before buying because some of their models put two gear switches on their 7 channel radios instead of one, which makes them unsuitable for battleships.
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