Dynamite Passport Ultra Force 220W Touch Battery Charger (6S/15A/220W)

if you notice in the Q&A for this item on the Horizon product page for it, there are people asking about the erroneous resistance readings once upgrading from 2.10 firmware. new firmware was released 3/17. as of today, 9/18/17, i updated my charger which i purchased a month ago and it has this resistance reading issue that others have reported.

i called support and the agent was completely dismissive of this problem. he said he hadn't heard about it, it hasn't come up in meetings and that "people say a lot on the internet". he also said he has used his charger "hundreds" of times without noticing this issue. well, good for you. if you DID notice it, would you have to pay out of your own pocket to send it back so you could discover your own firmware issue that multiple customers are reporting?

it was fine before the update, it's now not fine. and you can't revert the firmware!

and now the item is discontinued. if it didn't get proper support whilst still an active SKU, we can most assuredly expect nothing better now that it's obsolete. what kind of process is this by Horizon? leave us hanging with a faulty item?

it also has a ridiculously noisy fan at low RPM that is grinding, but it quiets down at high RPM which is the mode it's in the majority of the time.

our hobby has become one of throwaway offshore items and the customer service behind it apparently isn't much better.

As an owner of the previous Passport Ultra Force 200w charger, I can say without a doubt that Dynamite has greatly improved with this new 220w variation. The 200watt version took ages to balance a battery, I mean it could take close to two hours to charge a 5000mah lipo at 10a. Not very good. Not to mention the fan on it was quite ridiculously loud. It was a powerful charger though and I had kept it over the years because it could charge just about any battery I needed, albeit kind of slow.

This new charger however has remedied all of the faults of the old one. The balance cycle is substantially quicker, where now I can fully charge a battery at a 1c charge rate in about an hour or less, and if I balance charge at 15 amps, I can get a 7200mah lipo to its limit in a half hour or so coming from a storage charge. HUGE IMPROVEMENT. The touch interface is surprisingly responsive and can be used even if you have gloves on as it is not a capacitive touch screen. So you can use your finger, a stylus, a penny, whatever you have on hand.

The insulated banana plugs are very easy to connect and disconnect which for me is a huge plus. The supplied Dean's plug though resulted in a tight fight with my current dean's lipos (aa simple remedy though would be installing an official Dean's plug on the banana adapter). I hope this will loosen up over time as it is a little difficult for me to pull the dean's plugs apart after a charge cycle. Though my issue is that my hands are weakened from an illness, any healthy individual will probably not see the same issue I did. Weak hands, issue, healthy hands, no problem.

As far as ease of use, well it was so easy that I didn't even have to read the manual to start charging my first Lipo. It's just pretty self-explanatory as soon as you power it up. Just make sure you enter the correct parameters for your battery and off ya go.

And lastly, the fan. It is still loud, but not annoyingly loud like its older brother. I can easily have this sitting next to me on the work bench charging a battery and not be irritated by the noise it makes.

Overall this is an excellent charger and for the price it's hard to beat. I would definitely buy again and am even considering getting a 2nd one to stay permanently at home.