There are many types of RC controllers, the most common are pulse position modulated FM. Is this what you would like to try?
I think you were trying AM which gives inferior quality due to amplitude modulation of the antenna positions and the AGC response time must be faster than the bandwidth
of the signal modulation due to fading losses with a rapid shifting mobile transmitter. The Q factor also affects the gain of each stage but you need high gain with AGC to normalize the output. With motion, dead spots giving deep attenuation, you need very high gain and very fast AGC.
In any case here is one Futaba AM transmitter using a 27MHz Crystal on the right corner.
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In any radio system, the quality of the signal depends on the Q of multi-stage filters and noise threshold.
Here is an old Futaba FM Modulator for PPM.
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For more ideas
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It is better to understand why a good design works well than to try to understand why something that is insufficient works poorly.
Here is a good AM AGC superhet receiver with cascaded filter channels to block adjacent channels.
1st stage Crystal Osc mixes antenna filtered signal thru many stages of IF filtering. Ceramic resonators were not available back then for the IF which make it much easier now.