Oh, if I was wrong! I quickly grew out of it, and purchased a second hand Blade 400. Luckily I was told by a friend at the field to take it easy, and to follow the RADD method. I thought he was just an old, worried dude, but gave RADD a go. Thank god I did it his way.
After the first few batteries it was clear that fixed pitch helicopters have NOTHING to do with real choppers. And that if I did not want to spend a fortune in spares and entire evenings repairing my B400 I had to find another way to train myself.
This is when I found out about flight simulators, and purchased Phoenix RC. What an awesome thing to do! I can't recommend it enough. There are many sims out there, the most common are Phoenix RC, Real Flight, Aerofly Deluxe, Clearview, and even a free one, FMS.
I was using my trusty Spektrum DX6i back then, and I it was working perfectly. Shortly after though I decided to upgrade to a Spektrum DX8 and this is where my problems started. Basically I was using an 8ch radio and I was not able to configure the simulator to take full advantage of the capabilities of the transmitter. Especially the gyro and governor functions.
Then I found out how to do it, it is pretty simple really, here we go:
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| Once you are at the "field", with your radio connected and all, click on the "your controls" tab under "system". |
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| Then click on your radio brand, and then on your model. On the right there are 4 tabs, click on "Edit Profile". Phoenix will prompt you with a warning, saying that you have to create a copy of the profile first, follow the instructions and do it. |
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| This is the fun part: once you are done creating a copy of the profile you will get on this window. Here you can assign each channel to a function. Taking helicopters as an example I assigned the gyro to my gyro switch (channel 5) and the governor RPM control to my aux2 switch (channel 7). Scrolling down you would get to Fixed wing aircrafts, and I assigned my aux3 channel (the knob) to flaps, channel 5 is assigned to gear and aux2 to airbrakes. |
After you are happy with the result click on finished. It may be that some yellow bars on the left of the window act a bit funny, but don't worry, you'll fix that in a moment.
Now you should be back at the virtual field, with your aircraft ready to take off. Click on "system" again, and then on "your transmitter". Now go on and calibrate it.
NOTE: to successfully calibrate transmitters in Phoenix what you have to do is to position all your sticks and switches in the middle position (if you can choose between three), or "off" position if you can only choose between two.
To help you doing this you can open up the "monitor" window on your transmitter. On the DX8 it is the last one once you have selected a model. From there you can make sure every channel is at 0.
When you are finished calibrating the transmitter you will see that all the bars are now moving accordingly to the switches and sticks, allowing you to take full advantage of the great potential of 8 channels!
Enjoy your training!
