I know this is totally lame...

but its a big step for me


my first hover in my frontyard without beginners' gear

[darren_uk]

First: You lucky, lucky person for having a front yard you can do that on! (maybe space is more abundant in Belgium than it is in South East England, but still I envy you :-))

Second: Oh goodness, no don't say it's lame. I'm not saying this in a false, patronising way (i.e., I'm not saying it with a saccharin smile) - I genuinely mean it. I'm proud of my heli too!

And congratz! Not sure if you did that "pushing it over to realise that it does take a fair about for it to not land square on its skids" exercise, and hence are more confident about professively lowering the collective for the landings, rather than messing about when it's just about to touch down.

I'm still in the hovering stage really (side to side, forward and back) and it still gives me pleasure. One day I'll want to do something else, but I'm happy at my current level - as I guess you are :-)

[colin]

Congrats!!!

This is the first step to many more!! Good to see you hovering nicely.

)

well. it took me some time to actually dare to fly like this.
Actually the model is much more stable without the training gear.
Landings work too I actually succeeded on landing within 20 cm of the spots I desired to land
But now I feel quite confident about it... gonna take on forward flight pretty soon. Ive been practising a LOT on sims and I think I can make it (after about 3 months of hovering around, circles, eights, etc) Ill make some mpeg of my first flying around attempts and post some urls.
All thanks to Colins' site that was quite a help on learning rc heli flying on your own




some hours later looking at the picture Im still f***ing proud of it ))

[colin]

Hi Tbone

Keep practicing your hover until you can land on a dime.

This is important as all flights start and end with a hover.

Also, once you're comfy with taking off, and then landing, start using IDLE UP settings. You need to have negative pitch with high RPM if you want to start forward flights. I would suggest the following approach:

1) Practice so that you can land on a dime.

2) Hover higher, say about 2 storeys up, and then slowly come back down to earth.
- If you're still on normal pitch/throttle setting, remember that lowering your collective Lowers your throttle, so make that descend gentle.

3) Setup you Idle up... hover to about 10 feet up and turn on the idle up. Make sure your hover point on your TX for normal pitch and idle up pitch is the same setting, so that when you switch from normal to idle up, there is no change in engine or pitch in the heli, which will jerk the heli and make you loose balance or concentration.

4) Continue practicing hovering, ascending/descending using Idle up settings. Here, you will find the heli very responsive in both climbing and descending, so watch that descend!...

5) Next, Practice hovering at a distance. Hover your heli further away from you more and more, until it is like 100ft or more, away from you, then tail in and bring it back. Make sure you are confident to this point.

6) Slowly increase the speed of bringing your heli out to a distance. You will effectively be starting forward flight in this way.


Steps 1 to 5 is quite important because anytime you're in forward flight and get disorientated, pull your heli as high as you can away from the ground, and establish a hover. Your heli might just be a dot in the sky when tat happens. But at least you can regain control ot it.

http://www.helifever.com/images/flyfar.jpg

It may look like this...

ok Colin, I wil take this in mind when I try tomorow... I trust your advice blindfoldly, it has brought me pretty far to this point allready before I try forward flight, Im gonna setup me first idle up (Im pretty used to idle up on sims, but never tried it in real life) as I wake up again tomorow...
Although my heli will never be capable of real 3d flight, Im sure I can have it setup in idle up 1 to -5, 2,9 pitch on a 100,75,100 throttle curve. The mechanics of the older zxx dont allow -9 to 9 pitch curve. But prolly Im far away of taking full advantage of that pitch curve anyway

[colin]

Originally posted by tbone
[
Although my heli will never be capable of real 3d flight, Im sure I can have it setup in idle up 1 to -5, 2,9 pitch on a 100,75,100 throttle curve. The mechanics of the older zxx dont allow -9 to 9 pitch curve. But prolly Im far away of taking full advantage of that pitch curve anyway

-2 at the negative end would be good enough for starters. Don't get too ambitious. Sometimes you panic, and drop throttle, forgetting that you're in idle up and you hit -5 degs, the heli is going to wack on the ground very hard.

Eh?.. My very first ZXX could do -10 to +10, and I use the radio completely to adjust all the travel points. In other words, physically, the servos can travel from -10 to +10 pitch, but when I program my radio, I set the low point so that the pitch reads only -2, and so on...

In this way, I can quickly configure my heli anyway I want, without having to adjust any push rods. If you look at the ZXX collective arm, do you see a tiny hole about 1 cm above the hole that you connect the servo to? If you use the bottom most hole on the collective arm, you will get about 10 deg range to play. But if you use the hole that's higher up, you get 20 degs range to play.

haaa didn't see that hole yet.. well Im not ready for that fancy flying stuff anyway, I was just thinking ahead. But its cool to know about that other hole. I tried with my current setup (out of curiosity) what would be the maximum range of the pitch, and I found it to be a bit small. Now I can test it with that othre hole

thanx