RR EP54: Rotorflight a Year Later, a look at our different experiences

Welcome to the Rotor Revolution RC podcast with Brian Birdsong, Alex Dean, Kenny Hutton, and Nick Wisdom. Welcome to the Road to Revolution. I am your host, Nick, and this is episode... Oh my gosh, Nick. I just wanted to remind you that I'm back.

He's back. It's good to have you back, Alex. I mean, you were kind of back. You weren't in half the episode, but it's good to have you on the front. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. You can start over now. No, I don't need to start over. Okay. I'm just going to say it's episode 55.

5-5. Wow. 5-5, baby. That's a good number, man. 5-5. It is a good number. We got some listener mail to kick us off, too. When we get to the number 67, are we going to do the... the kid thing or not so what is that do somebody like okay explain that i'll explain it right so my kids are into this six seven thing it comes from a music video where this rapper dude is raising his left and right hands

alternatively up and down as he sings the lyric about six, seven. Yep. And the kids all jumped on it. It's just dumb. And so anytime a teacher accidentally says six, seven or whatever, all the kids do it. Oh my God. So. My wife gets this idea. We go trick-or-treating with my kids and sometimes it's fun to annoy your children. Oh, it's very fun. Yes, I love doing it. Custom Halloween t-shirts made. So she made a t-shirt for herself.

that has a six on it and one for me that was a seven so we went as six seven for halloween nice that's awesome my kids were appalled random people were like can we take your picture that's hilarious so like All these random people took our picture, which my kids were like, this is stupid. What is happening? I think what's really going on is the parents hate it. And so we're trying to make it annoying as possible. So yes, totally.

and yeah so all any kid that saw us would do the stupid six seven thing and it was hilarious we had a good time made trick-or-treating fun anyway we're digressing so yes maybe one of our kids will have a guest spot going six seven when we get to episode 67 of course by then my our kids will be like it's so not cool it's over by then yeah no it's gonna be like six months so it'll be something else 2025 calls i didn't want it yeah exactly it wants its numbers back

oh sorry we digress already right out of the game hey let's do some listener mail before updates uh okay so listener lee trevarthen sorry if i butchered your name there lee sent us a note recently asking us if he were to go with a 6s 700 so it does not have a 12s 700 so for budget reasons wants to go with a 6s 700 would we recommend the tron dynamic pro or

the new Il Goblin Puma, which would we recommend? I feel like they're going to be totally different flying experiences, aren't they? Because the Puma is essentially the old raw. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't sure what to tell him, so I started asking some questions. And it turns out where he lives, it's pretty persistently windy. To which I said, well, maybe a 12S setup would be better. And he said, no, 12S is out of the budget. It means new charger, new packs, et cetera, et cetera. So what do we think?

I think if it's windy, I'd go with the raw. The Puma, yeah. Maybe so. I mean, it's hard to say that, though, because we already know the dynamic flies really well. Like, how do we recommend a helicopter we've never flown? Well... That's the thing. And if crash costs are an issue, then maybe the dynamic really is the answer because the raw is going to be significantly more expensive with that carbon boom and all that stuff. Well...

Yeah, that's true. The canopy and boom would be more expensive. Nope. But everything else would be about the same for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know. I suggested, or my thought was that the Puma would make sense because it's just a little bit heavier and in the wind that would help. Yeah, I agree. But he could also just put, you know, 690 blades on it and not 700s and be happy. Yeah, go with a heavier disc loading.

for sure make it make it heavier yeah uh heavier packs 5500s or 6000s maybe in it um give it a little more weight in the wind would go a long way as well yeah that's true Well, cool. I love that the answer is, it's up to you. It really is, right? Probably both great helis, and I say probably because I haven't flown a Puma. Not many people have at this point. It only just released.

Actually, it's not even out to the public yet. It's only like a few team guys. Yeah. But Kyle spoke highly of it at Urcha, so I'm sure it flies great. It's definitely an improvement over the previous Puma, I hear. Yeah, it doesn't do that low RPM wobble thing. Yeah, and the canopy, I think, is better supported because originally it would kind of shake around as well. Yeah, it would shake around like crazy. Which drives me crazy. Yep. All right.

Anyway, Lee, hope that helps point you in the right direction. But speaking of wind, Brian, do you want to go next? Oh my gosh, sure.

So everybody, I'm back from windy Tampa, Florida, where I participated in my last F3C competition. Yes. The last one ever or just the last one for the year? Well, the last one for the year. Okay. All right. Yeah. The last one for the year. ever this year yeah tampa tampa normally finishes off our year but we're trying to change that we may do a november f3c competition here in atlanta next year that's still up in the air so

Crossing our fingers that we can do it, but we're trying to make that one the last one. If not, Tampa will remain the last one. Nonetheless, it was a lot of fun, but it was... super windy. And I think we picked up a lot of this wind from that hurricane that was down into the islands. Right. And it stayed consistently between 15 and 20 miles an hour.

miles an hour on friday saturday it was about 20 to 25 miles per hour and and it was constant and not even just gusts it was just a constant wind flow right and so which honestly Kind of made it easy to fly in because you knew what you were up against. If it stayed consistent like that, you know how you had to lean the helicopter to hover nice and solid, how to really counter the wind when you go up and do your aerobatics and such.

I was scared, but not that scared because, again, it was constant wind. And luckily for us, too, the wind was at our backs blowing across the field. So we didn't have that crazy thing where you go climb so high.

wind is pushing the helicopter towards you. I hate that scenario. So it was fun. Needless to say, it was still a lot of fun. The participation was pretty low. It was really only three pilots participating in the competition. We had... several uh 3d guys there that was flying through over in the 3d boxes which is great to watch those guys fly too but yeah i think you know for everyone that we thought was going to come and participate it was just like

a month of other events for these guys. I mean, weddings, like a few of the guys had to go to weddings. We had babies being born. I mean, it was like everybody had some other kind of crazy event happening that. you know, pulled them away from the competition. So it was a really low participation. So we kind of treated it like a clinic, so to speak, right? I mean, we scored ourselves just to see if we could get better per round and things like that.

I wouldn't call it a competition. I would call it more of just a F3C clinic to kind of close out the year, which was great because still trying to learn these new maneuvers from the new schedule for next year. And it was absolutely. horrible in the wind trying to do that stuff. So I was like, you know, how about I just go back and get out of FAI and go back to expert to just have a good time while I'm down here in the gusty wind. So that was Tampa.

still a lot of fun at least we didn't get like crazy rain and i like that but it was just windy i've never flown that kind of wind conditions before so that's that's no joke man 20-25 miles an hour is serious business

Dude, it was humming. It was crazy. What was the hardest part of flying in the wind? Was it the aerobatics that hovers? The hovering was the hardest part because you have to do stuff so slow. And for expert, even for FAI, I mean, every hover routine maneuver is some type of transitional rotation.

So you're having to do a pirouette while you're traveling up and performing a circle or half circle or a triangle while you're doing it. It's just hard to keep it in line when you have the wind blowing like that. So that was the toughest part. The aerobatics wasn't too bad. You were able to keep your bird in place as best you could. The real toughest part of it, though, is when you do those verticals and you go straight up.

You know, you're applying like negative 10 degrees of pit just to stay straight up so the wind can pass through the blades. Right. If you go up at zero degrees, it's just going to blow it right on down the field. That was crazy. That was absolutely crazy. Brian, I kind of half expected your answer to be the hardest part of it was hearing my caller. with the wind noise look i i guys but check this out so i i love i love uh

Nick and Sean a message just to kind of give them an idea of how strong the wind was blowing. They said, we could barely hear a word you were saying on the recording. It was like the weatherman in the hurricane. Yeah. Oh, but you know what? Shouts out to my caller, though, Jeff. Jeff, thank you, bro, for calling out for me. But Jeff flew sportsman, and so he had no idea what expert was like. So, you know, he was calling.

He tried his best to call for me, and he was off when it was time to start the maneuver and finish the maneuver. So a few rounds, I was like... not necessarily getting frustrated, but then I was like, let me just call it out loud myself. And so I would call it for him. I'm like, okay, here we go. Here we go. Okay. And begin. And then he would yell, begin. And then I would go and do it. So I kind of had to train him how to.

Are you saying that maybe you would not ask him to do it again? No, because I've been there with him. When I started learning how to call for people, too. Brian, I just wanted to hear you talk some trash. I was going to say, it wasn't long ago you were learning F3N routines. Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, not even getting started with that, but yeah. But no, man, that was it for Tampa. Again, good trip, fun. Can't wait till next season starts, which I believe is late April sometime over in Arkansas.

I believe we'll have a competition in Jonesboro, Arkansas with Wes Muneer will be contest director of that particular event. So looking forward. But anyway, back home. you know, chilling and it's chilly outside. So, you know, that temperature drop at low 60. I'm hanging up the blades. No way. You're that big of a baby. I am a huge.

wimpy baby when it comes to cold weather. That's not even cold yet. That's not. That's like great flying weather. Bro. Agreed. That's borderline shorts weather. No, I gotta tell you. Well, let me tell you, let me tell you. So during the weekdays, though, I mean, I hooked up with Aaron Kramer, my buddy Aaron Kramer up in Tennessee. And he said, oh, yeah, it's getting cool up here, too. So I was like, dude, let's sim. Let's kind of.

get our sims together and start you know practicing or whatever so he was like all right that's cool so we we downloaded the helix simulator and got it hooked up to our vr headsets And we jump in this thing and it's beautiful. The site, we pick a field to fly it. And they had the SAB Genesis, which is really cool. So we were able to load the Genesis up and just go fly it around in there.

I just love flying with the VR headset and these emulators. It is an absolute great experience. I really love VR for other things, but for this, I don't. I like the screen. But see, and I tell you, Ali, it makes sense for 3D-ers. Right. It does not make sense for F3Cers. We need stationary positioning to do our routine. So it makes sense for us. But yeah, I get it for the 3D guys. But it's an awesome.

The physics, the mechanics of this thing is just incredible. If you haven't tried it, try it out. It's a free download. You can download it and fly the demonstration for free. Just try an auto rotation. I mean, it's amazing how well it is compared to real life. It's a sim, but it's so real life is ridiculous. It's pretty cool. So I did a bit of simming with the VR with Aaron. That was a lot of fun.

And then Nick calls me up and says, hey, man, let's go to the field. So it's like Monday and it's chilly. And I'm like, I'm like, what time you want to get up? Wait, what? Nine o'clock. We need to go ahead and qualify what chilly is for you. 48 degrees at the time. 48 degrees, bro. Is that like seven in the morning? Nine. Nine o'clock. So the sun's just coming out, dude. It's about to warm up. It's a great day. Exactly. And I'm like, okay, I said, well, Nick.

I'll be there by 11. I'm going to let a few degrees come up over the horizon and then I'll be out there to join you. So it did just that. The sun came up. It was beautiful. It was getting warm. I threw on a t-shirt, though, with my sweatshirt. You know, I almost got my earmuffs out, but I didn't need my earmuffs. But I packed one bird, some batteries. Brian, I wish I was there around you to make fun of you more often.

with your flying attire. Dude, I get made fun of so much because I am such a wimp to fly in cold weather. These guys destroy me every winter. They destroyed everyone. You're just lucky that Mikkel Graham is in our troop because he just will not show up below 60 degrees. Nope. Like he just stops flying when the temperature drops below 60. Mikkel will post in our group. He'll post.

I'm loosening up the tail belts, hanging the birds on the wall. The season is closed. I don't know what to say. I can't even. I can't. I can't. I haven't. My mom said when I don't have something nice to say. I was there by nine. I'd already been up, gotten the kids to school, did a bunch of stuff. Was at the field by nine. I was cold, but I flew.

Just got in the car between flights because it was windy. Your hands got cold, but no big deal. I don't like that. So I get up there a little after 11, and it's decent. And luckily for us, we didn't have, you know, wind gusts. I mean, it was sad. constant three degrees. I mean, it was three miles per hour. It was nothing. And the sun was out, not a cloud in the sky. It was beautiful. It was a gorgeous day. But it was still chilly. Here's the deal, too. It's my hands.

And I feel like I don't get quick response from frozen fingers. That's my problem. No, I agree. I agree with that. Like, my body is fine. You know, I can put my hoodie on. You just bring a hand warmer, dude. And you warm your transmitter up. I got to get a hand warmer. My goal this year is to fly in December here. And I want to get the little hand covers or whatever it's called. I think we posted a link on our little show last year.

when we did this i'll go back and find that link fingerless gloves you can get that are heated or just do what i do you get a couple of usb hand warmers that you hold on to in between flights keep them in your pockets Yeah, I use like the hand warmers inside of the little transmitter case if it's cold enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that too. Exactly. But that's my deal, dude. Just my fingers get cold like that. If we do an episode on flying in the winter, you'll have to just listen, Brian.

Okay. But no, guys, that's my update, man. Just chilling, looking forward to today's topic. So I won't give it away yet. I'll let you guys talk about chur.

adventures here before we get into it. So there you go. Right on. Who wants to go next? I can go next, I guess. Go for it, Kenny. So yeah, last weekend, was this last weekend when you guys went out and you were cold? What date? When was this? That was just yesterday. Yes, yesterday. It was that soon? Okay.

We went out on, I think it was Saturday or Sunday last weekend, and it was like 55 or easy, but I didn't think it felt cold like you guys were saying in 60 even. That's because you're a man. We had 15 to 20 mile an hour winds and it didn't. It felt normal to me. Jeez. Oh, my God. I would have died. Yes. I mean, it was a little bit odd. That would have gone.

Yeah, it wasn't bad. It was still sunny out. But like we're flying in the wind and, you know, some people don't like, you know, it bothers some people, but. I started having fun with it. Like I was flying, you know, because it was down our runway, which was actually perfect. You know, it wasn't coming towards me or from behind or nothing. So then I could come left, you know, and it's pushing me to the right, but I was able to do stuff.

that I wouldn't be able to practice as easily, you know, if the wind wasn't coming. I've noticed that, you know, you actually have a better chance of learning some things you're trying to learn. Maybe not, you know, centering peril flips and staying level, but you can do... some different maneuvers that actually helps you out to fly in the wind you know just doing even funnels and stuff like that you use a lot more pitch so it doesn't make your

You know, your pitch stick, basically your fingers just go dead where, you know, people go into like a funnel and you just sit there and leave your stick the same. You don't change your pitch. Well, this wind makes you change your pitch, you know, so you actually.

You actually get better, honestly, flying if it's 10 or 15 mile or wind, if you can handle that or it doesn't scare you, I guess. I don't know what you guys think about that, but does it bother you guys on a windy day to go out and mess with stuff like that? No.

As long as it's not blowing towards me, I hate that. It makes me really uncomfortable. Other than that, I'm happy. Yeah, I think at IRCHA that was doing that a little bit, sometimes it was coming towards us, which kind of sucks because if you get complacent, all of a sudden the helicopters come in. five ten feet from you and you had to push it back out yep my problem is when the wind's blowing at me unless i have really good tight sunglasses on my eyes water and then it makes it hard to see

Oh yeah, that's the problem I have when it's like super cold out. You know, the wind hits you in the eyes and your eyes are dripping and you can't see anything mid-flight. Do you guys wear contacts? It's worse with contacts, I feel like. No. No, but it does help to have glasses or something on that kind of helps block a little bit of the wind. No, wind can be fun to a point, and then it gets where it's no fun, and then you go home.

I agree. We did that for a while. It kind of got to, after about six flights or so, we're like, okay, we've all had enough, but it was fun for the time being. It was a little something different, you know. Get the Nitro out.

Yeah, I did. I did three flights or so on a Nitro and three or four on the electric while I was out there. Yeah, I got the Nitro 90. It was running great in the cold weather and the 55 feels, you know, Nitro loves 55. So it was pretty, pretty awesome for that. I got the turbine heli kind of ready to fly. I guess first I should go backwards. I got the kit, you know, like when it was here, it was already ready to fly, but it was in pieces, you know, from being shipped to me.

I didn't have time to set it up. So the guys at the field wanted to hear it run. It just went out as a chunk, you know, just a helicopter chunk with no head on it, just to run it so they could hear it. Yeah. You can like talking about Brian, not be able to hear somebody because of the wind. You're not going to hear anybody up close. You know, when you're running this thing, like even idling, you got to talk really loud or yell over it. You know, it's so loud. I can't believe how loud it is.

Yeah, they seem louder than some of the jets. I don't know if it's because the exhaust comes out both directions or what, but it seems pretty loud. Have you been out to the field with it or only at your house? backyard it seems pretty loud out there still i mean i just wonder if it's a difference of being in a smaller area yeah you're at the house i mean the field it sounded pretty close it was still pretty loud but we're all standing 10 feet from it you know so it makes a difference too

Is it like a horizontal smudge pot? Like, can you warm your hands on it? Yeah, you could. From 10 feet away. So, yeah, I went through the kit. Like once I started working on getting it ready and I realized, you know, this thing comes ready to fly, but they, you know, the factory, you can't always trust that stuff. I started going over bolts and like every 10th bolt had no Loctite. You know, they were like.

smooth threads clean like i'm like okay this thing would not last long in the air like this i think i had to do three or four bolts on the head like just the balls and stuff that were on the swash and then some side frame bolts

And a couple of grub screws that were not Loctited, you know, like the tail gears and stuff like that needed taken back out and just redone. I mean, they were all on there and slightly snug, but I don't want to trust that, you know, with something like that. So I went over every single bolt on the whole helicopter.

Redid every one of them, checked all the fittings and checked everything for Loctite and redid everything. So I got it to a point like I was going to take it out and test it in the backyard. I just did this today. So I took it out there and I'm... messing around with it. I went through the ECU program and basically you can see the transmitter's pulse width, the throttle on the screen of that. So I was going through the app and I'm setting the throttle up.

And it looked like, you know, I thought originally that I had it. I did the whole 100% thing. You kind of do it like an ESC. You do like 100% and let the ECU learn your throttle. Okay. And it looked like it was correct. And I thought, okay, I'm good. And I left it. And I thought it was like.

I went, I didn't really go into the ECU program again to look at what my idle one and two were. I just kind of did them on the transmitter. Then I'm like, okay, if it knows my percentage, I'll just put, you know, 65% for idle one and like 75 or 80 for idle two. So I took it out in the backyard.

earlier when i got home from work i'm like okay i'm gonna just at least hover this thing and just see what it does and it fired up you know and starts spooling up and i'm just in normal mode and it got up to like maybe 1200 rpm just starting to take off just in normal mode you know with like 20 throttle And I flipped it up into idol one and.

Suddenly, I mean, that thing ramps up quicker than I thought, and it was at like 2,800 RPM on the head like instantly. Whoa, what? Within like 3,800 millimeter blades. Good lord, dude. Yes. Wait, were blades on it? It was cranking. Yeah, it was cranking. I got it up in the air like 10 feet or 20 feet, and I just kind of popped back and forth on the pitch a little bit.

And then once it got that higher RPM, I was like, okay, shut down. And that wasn't even, it wasn't even done revving up. It was still going. I'm like, I'm going to shut this thing down now. I bet it would have been like 3,500 or so. It would have been crazy. My Lord. I didn't even know they would go that high. Like, wow.

Does it respond fast enough, the throttle, that you can have a governor or do you run like a flat throttle curve? You can run a flat, but I think you want to add like a little bit of, you know, like a center of like say 60 and then the next, you know, notch over would be like.

70 or 70 you know you kind of do an arched kind of curve I think so you can give it because it's always going to be behind you know if you're giving it pitch it's going to slowly catch back up but there's also expo settings kind of built into the ECU where it can

give itself a smoother expo as you're giving it throttle too so i don't have to play with that stuff and kind of learn you know i might have to put more throttle points in so it gives it more throttle like at an earlier point when you start to move the stick you know just jump it like more of a notch throttle closer to center yeah

Right now I've only got like five points. I'm just going to do it just to hover and test it. And I only did a slight curve like that. I'm putting it low enough in the center so it's not over-revving. But yeah, that's what happened. So it went crazy. I tried it again. I'm like, okay, I'll turn it down a little bit, but it was still too high.

So I went back in tonight and I plugged it into the programmer. And when I was looking at it, Idle 1 was actually 75%. And I never even touched Idle 2, but it was like way over 25 to 2800. Good Lord. Yeah, so those things, to get to the 2,000 or 1,800 head range like I would normally fly, it probably has to be at 55% to 65% throttle, I would say, which is crazy.

And it seems to have no lack of power. That thing weighs like 16 or so pounds and it felt like it didn't weigh hardly anything in the air. I was surprised. What about like gear ratios? I mean, would you have to decrease that? I don't know what the teeth are on it. I mean, it's...

It's just got like a, it looks like maybe like a 12 to 13 tooth pinion. And then I don't know what the main gear is. It looks like kind of a standard ratio. Pretty insane though. I mean, it ran and got up in the air at least. I did get to hover it a couple of times, but I did shut it down.

fairly shortly into the test hover because I didn't want it to rev to the moon. Any difficulty setting it up on Rotor Flight? No, I just... used a Nitron 90 setup and then did the servos, did the tail, did everything, like all the pitch settings and tail angle. And then just change the throttle stuff to different type of curves because I still have a normal throttle. You need normal throttle on the turbines, even on like a jet, you basically turn it to low throttle, like five or 10%.

And that just readies the system. And then you floor it, like bring the throttle stick up and then back down. And then that tells it to trigger the start sequence. And then it'll idle. But yeah, so I have a normal throttle and then two idle ups right now. Cool.

Oh, I'm impressed, man. You really dug into that thing, got it figured out quickly. I thought especially setting it up on rotor fly, it was going to be challenging. Yeah, using just a regular night trip throttle curve is fine. Yeah.

It's nice that the ECU does that much work. You don't have to figure it all out on the radio end. Yeah, it's all like digital throttle, almost like an ESC, but it controls a brushless fuel pump, you know? It's just smoothly controlling that, just like you would like a smoke pump on an airplane or something. Pretty cool.

How many batteries do you run? Just like one 12S stick or do you run like extras? There's a 3S. Not 12S, sorry. It's a 3S lithium phosphate LIFE pack. It's for the pump and the starting and everything. And then there's a receiver pack separate also. So there's two separate packs because the pump's going to be running a lot. And then the front starter motor, they run down the battery more. So you have a separate pack to run all that stuff. Yeah. That's cool. Other than that.

I bought something. I mean, you guys might know already from the post, but. Oh, yeah, I do. I cheated. I don't know. I want to know. I don't know. The Tron Elite. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did see that. I did see that.

I'm not just because of this thing here in the past few days been working a lot. I haven't got to do it yet, but I'm going to start working on it in the next few days and start building it. Nice. Should be fun. I'm stoked. I saw your picture. I like had a twinge of envy and I was like, no.

You can't order one. Stop it. Yeah, it's a different design. You know, the lower head and everything on it. And it's more compact. We'll see how it goes. It looks kind of cool. Looks very cool. Should be a fun build. I mean, I've had no issues building any of my Tron kits so far. I was about to say, I'm sure it will go very smooth. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be a fun build. I think the only thing I could request, I don't even know if this is the case, but...

I think they should just put that tail rod guide on the boom before you even get it. That's the only thing I could see, you know? Yeah. I don't know if it is. I didn't open this kit's boom part to see that, but that would be cool if they just went ahead and mounted the slider onto the boom. Yeah, and built your links. Just put it all together for me, please. I think that's it, though. Just getting ready to do a build and testing out the turbine stuff. Nice.

I'm excited to hear more about both of those things, the turbine. Me too. I'm excited for you to fly it. Are you going to 3D it? No, you're not, right? I almost 3D'd it the first time it went up. Oh, wow. Like on accident? I had too much. No, I just had a lot of head speed. I was like, man, once I shut it off, there was still enough RPM to just go up and down like twice.

Because it's got a torque tube tail, you know, so it just floats there anyway. It didn't come down, like, it didn't drop like I'm used to with the belt helicopters. So it's like, it's really smooth, floaty. You know, if it'll, if I can get the RPM down, cause I had the throttle completely wrong and I'm just not used to the turbine setup, but I'll get it. I've already readjusted. I just have to give it a try. That's cool. We shall see. Don't man.

All right. Well, I've been busy in many ways. Wrenching, buying, selling, flying, all the things. Making up for lost time the last couple of weeks. So I've been...

I was away for some of that, but I've been home as well. So kind of a mix of the two. So last we spoke, I was pulling my hair out, trying to get the Nitron 90 happy on rotor flight. And in a... fit of rage not really but after reaching maximum frustration i decided i just wanted to fly the damn thing and i put it on v bar v8 but had not maiden it so i have since maiden the nitron 90.

Nice. And it is, in a word, amazing. It's fantastic. It flies. I knew you were going to love it, dude. It's one of those helis that took me like half a flight to tune, and I'm just thrilled with where it's at. tuning wise just super easy that speed motor should be super i mean is it it's starting up and running great now it's i mean the motor has knock on wood i don't even like saying this out loud the motor has not been a problem that's great

It's been fantastic. It like starts on the first blip instantly. Like I even guessed to the idle percentage in the radio, right? First, like just and it's running every time. Just about. I saw it fly to it. Looks really good, Nick. Nick flew the hell out of that bird. Looks awesome. It's really fast, too. It is fast. That thing rips. I'm like, I need to turn the pitch down maybe a little. But then I'm really enjoying how crazy.

The problem we have with the Nitron 90 is you get to having fun with it and you run out of fuel. Dude, it does run out of fuel fast. You're right about that. You fly it and you're like, oh, look, I have nothing left. i've been warned about this tank that you know it's it's a it's a six minute tank pretty much and you keep an eye on it so i'm pretty good about putting in an hover and staring at the tank for a second every now and then i have a timer on it too but dude

The 91 speed with the absolute CNC vector pipe is an amazing combination. Yeah, dude, it makes really good power. I can't say enough good things about that muffler. I mean, granted, I'm a nitro noob, so... don't believe anything i say but versus my experience with the 105 on the raw nitro this thing is just on another level like 15 20 more power than i got on that raw nitro setup and that's probably my fault but

whatever i've lucked into a great setup and it's amazing gobs of power like i can bog it if i really try but in my natural flying it just doesn't really bog it just ebbs and flows as nitro does but it's awesome So super enjoying that. Got to give a shout out to my buddy, Chris Moss, who I fly with in Atlanta. And he is, at least in the local area, one of two trusted Nitro friends.

And Chris was always there with me as I maidened it and helped me get the engine roughed in and tuned in. That's cool. Keeps an eye on it for me and is a good nitro teacher. Always sharing little tidbits of information every time we fly together when we fly nitro. So thanks, Chris.

for helping me get that thing in the air. Anyway, huge smile on my face. Just loving this thing. So I fly the Nitron 90 and I have a great day with that. And I go, you know what? Let's try V-Bar V8 on one of my Il Goblin Pros. And let's see how it compares to the other Il Goblin Pro on Rotor Flight. So, got it set up, got the SX-Z1 on it.

And I made that as well since we spoke last on V-Bar. And I spent a decent chunk of time, three packs probably, getting the tune where I wanted it, landing a bunch, adjusting things, learning things with V8. I'm not the pilot that Alex and others are and Kenny, but for me, it's every bit as good as Rotor Flight on the SXC. And we'll talk about this a little more in the main topic.

But essentially, after my frustrations with Nitro and getting it on the SXC and being so happy with it, I'm moving my fleet to V-Bar. I'm going back. And we'll dig into this more in the main topic. I'm sorry, what did you just say? I'm going back to V-Bar. The whole fleet? The whole fleet. You're joking with me, right? I'm having a panic attack right now. I'm not joking.

You know what? I feel good about it. I'm so happy for you, Nick. I really am. Because it should be about fun, man. And I get it. I mean, it's frustrating. And we'll talk about it a little bit more in detail. But yeah, this works for you, man.

the joy in your piloting skills out there Monday, flying your bird. So do it, bro. Do it. I mean, now that Brian has made sense of it, sure, but I just can't believe it. Like, after... after all the time you spent learning ethos and all that other stuff i know i know well that's the thing right is it's all the time and then the nitro was even more time

I definitely have update fatigue. I have update fatigue so bad. And it hit as I'm like in exactly that update fatigue. And I also feel compelled to want to do all the updates because... I want to learn what new features are in there. And it's just, it's taking too much time. And the other day I was like, I'm really grumpy. Like I'm here in my office wrenching and I'm in a bad mood.

and i don't want to be in a bad mood when i have i can grow on the other side you're on the other side of the wall um and i'll say this now i i will never say anything bad about rotor flight i will give anybody a very factual description of the experience of what it's like and what i might recommend or not to for folks to do but it's still 100 the best flying fbl on the market hands down there's a reason that

kenny co and mck and you know the guys at the top of the hobby are flying it and i haven't flown them all i haven't flown trinity or whatever but it flies great but anyway v bar is just easy and right now i want to hit the easy button I'm throwing in the towel, and I'm hearing this. That is very fair. So that's where that is. I've got more, man. I did way too much stuff in the last two weeks. That's it. I'm moving back to Beast X.

it's not that far back dude come on you know another thing with this rotor flight v-bar thing and the it wasn't just frustration And it wasn't just update fatigue. You know what else I'm tired of? Tired of asking for help. Tired of asking for help. I've always been, at least I used to think I was, one of those people that can figure out hobby electronics pretty quickly. Like it's intuitive.

i enjoy it i dig into it but i'm also self-sufficient like i'm not afraid to go read forums and dig into manuals and like experiment with stuff on the bench until i teach it to myself but rotor flight i just couldn't teach to myself so i had to call people all the time and i don't like that like when it's 10 o'clock at night when i have time to wrench i don't want to have to like see who's online or whatever like i want to just

That's fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. Wow. This is going to be a fun conversation we're about to have. It's going to be a good conversation. I feel like there's always a small part of me that has the podcast in mind. I'm like, there's too many of us on Rotoflight. We need more FBL diversity on the show. So that was a small part of it too. To have one of us with our foot in the V-bar door is a good thing. Now you got to install the different range.

module now too so you can tell us how that works oh yeah so we're getting there wow good so yeah so i made this decision and then in kind of a last minute late night decision and there wasn't even any drinking involved i ordered a new vcontrol evo plus i ordered two of the new dynamic rf modules And two of the 14,000 milliamp batteries for the extended life. And you spent $14,000. And some Evos. And we'll talk a little more later in the show about the price of all of that.

during perhaps a Road to Rage segment. But yeah. But anyway, so now I have a Touch and an Evo Plus. Did you get a couple of those Mikado backup guards? No, I did not. I thought about it for a laugh. I really like those. Those are really cool. But I do. I was looking at my buddy Chris's the other day at the field, and I'm like, that's cool. The integration's cool. So I might try one for a laugh. It is cool. Pretty cool. So I order all that stuff.

And I get the radios and I'm putting the modules in and I'm putting in the new radio. I always convert my back right switch. I hate the momentary switch. So I put a three position switch in there and do some stuff. So I get all that going late at night as usual, right before I hit the field. And so Monday, yesterday, I go out to meet Brian at nine o'clock. Only he's not coming till 1130 until it warms up for his hands warm up. Princess fingers.

so i made my other ill goblin pro on vbar and i learned a bunch of things so in vbar you can save a model and then load it on a new fbl which is what I did because I wanted to just transfer the tune and see how well it would transfer. And fired it up, spooled it up. And in banks two and three, which is like 1,800 and 2,000 RPM, it flies great.

tune transferred really well didn't have to touch the thing but in the low head speed bank the tune is terrible like big elevator bubble and this is a model i've flown on rotor flight for a year and it flies perfectly smooth the same low rpm so i know it's not the model

so i'm messing with it and trying a bunch of things and it's interesting i had to take the integral and the head gain down to way low it's like the head gains down at 70 now and the integrals in the 20s and that took care of it but

It's just radically different. So it was interesting to me that RotorFlight, I feel like, transfers really well the tune between models of the same type. And I don't think that's really true of V-Bar. I feel like V-Bar's tune is very individual to the specific model. Not even... like sxc or ill goblin pro but like specific to the individual helicopter more so maybe it's because it's filtering is different is my guess but

So I have these elevator baubles. So I spend like three or four batteries chasing this bauble in this low RPM until I finally find the right combination of things that takes care of it. And then I'm like, cool, now I can just fly it. So I start flying it around, and it's on Hobbywing GovStore, which is what I have run it on on other models.

And I'm having random governor issues start appearing. Like it's, it's like the governor is out of sync and the RPM data is, you know, smooth and coming in regularly. So it's not that as I look at the logs. But it's like cutting out for a second and then kicking back in and cutting out and coming back in. And I'm like, this is just weird. So I redid the setup, like reset the EFC, relearned the GovStore at 50% spool up at zero pitch.

And problems still persist. And I'm like, that is bizarre. So I'm trying to figure out what's going on, set it to vbargov, and the problem goes away, which is weird. So I guess it's an ESC issue. But it's odd to me because that ESC has run on GovStore before. So I can't. That one was weird, but it seems to be fine on V-Bar Govs. And I flew it a bunch of times since. So I don't know. Weird. Any thoughts on that one?

Yeah, maybe try a roadway flight. Oh, I'm going to hear that for the next forever. Oh, yeah. I am going to keep a Rotoflight setup so I can test stuff if I want to, if the mood strikes me. So anyway, get the other El Goblin Pro done. I'm like, all right, cool. Let's bust out the Nitron 90 again. This is around the time Brian showed up.

One of the reasons I like to keep an older V-Control, like my old touch, is because I don't like getting nitro all over my fingers and then all over a brand new shiny radio. So I'm like, oh, I'll use the touch for the nitro as my primary nitro radio. So...

I get the model out, and I set everything up to start it, and I take a quick look at the motor just to make sure that the car body is on the idle setting before I start it. I always make sure that... you know the dots in the right place for starting so but i usually would then move the throttle and make sure the throttle moves but i didn't do that this time i don't know why but i was like oh cool it's in idle everything's working start it up fires right up and set it down

go to spool it up in bank one and it's not spooling up and i'm like that's weird moving the throttle stick up i'm like i'm in bank one motors on like it should be spooling up why is this thing not working So I'm like, well, let me just hit throttle cut and I'll just check the throttle setup on the bench again. So I hit throttle cut and nothing happens. Motor still idling, just sitting there purring happily. Well, that's weird.

So I hit cut, nothing's working. I eventually just go over and manually just force the servo a little bit and the motor dies. Take it to the bench. And I'm like, did the throttle servo come unplugged? Like the throttle is not responding.

So then I proceed to chase my tail for about 20 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong. And I'm like, this is annoying. I don't know what's going on. But I'm going to put this away and I'm going to go get the other radio, the other V-bar, and use that radio. So I get that radio out.

that one's given me trouble i'm like i have everything working except throttle cut like the you know my endpoints are good the idle's good why isn't throttle cut working anyway chase my tail for a bunch more time checking all the wrong things humorously this is the laugh so you make fun of me now on the new radio the reason why throttle cut wasn't working is because i hadn't set up the throttle cut switch in the transmitter late at night when i was configuring the new radio so

there's a setting in the governor where you have to assign the switch for title cut and i just hadn't done that i missed it so got that figured out and then flew it on the new radio and it flew great everything was fine and then

i'm like man i can't believe i forgot to do that or i was checking all the wrong things you know how you go you're troubleshooting you just go all the wrong directions but here's where the funny part comes in i'm in the car driving home and i'm thinking about why the touch didn't work and i was like

It was just non-responsive. And then I was like, oh, you know what else didn't work? The remote glow didn't work on the back left switch. So I'm like the back right switch and the back left switch aren't working. Why wouldn't that work? And I'm thinking, and I'm thinking. And I get home and I unload the car and I'm like, oh, you dumbass. I was like, I know what happened. Put the radio on the bench, take the back cover off. Yep. When I put the 14,000 milliamp pack in, I did not plug in.

the back left and back right switches to the board when I put the cover back on. Nice. And if you don't plug switches into the board, they don't work. That's hilarious. I was really thinking that like when you did the setup wizard. that the V bar control was just saying, had like a question that said, were you a previous rotor flight user? Yes or no. And then you answered yes. So it just embedded some crazy mistakes and problems that you had to find just to drive. Oh gosh.

yep yep so that was just my dumbassery i did learn something interesting so vbar 2 when you transfer models macro cells don't transfer with them so when you save the model to the you know save it to the radio from the fbl and then transfer it to a new fbl the macro cell settings don't go with it i didn't know that interesting i was also chasing my tail why the remote glow driver wasn't working because i had to set that up again um so

Anyway, that kind of makes some sense. I think a lot of the stuff's just coming off the fly bar list, so it's independent from your radio settings, I guess. Yeah. All right, so that's most of it, but there's still a little more, and that'll shut up, I swear.

so i still can't believe it yeah i i can't quite either other than my shoulders have dropped like an inch in height of tension there is less like Rotor flight stress in my life. I can hear Nick at the field. He was like, I'm tired, Brian. I'm ready to go home now. I'm tired, Forrest. Somebody's going to make a cartoon. He just wants to go back to V-Bar.

With Brian saying, I'm cold, and me holding a V-Control saying, my brain hurts. You're both holding each other at the field. So, I sold something. Is it your rotor flight radio? Rotor flight gear. I have sold a lot of rotor flight FPLs. It was amazing how many I have when I started pulling them out of models and finding extras I had around because it's so damn cheap.

Did you also sell your ego because you had to go back to V-Bar? No. I mean, I know that the V-Bros are going to be like, oh, we told you you'd be back. I know, I know, I know. Fuck you. I'm fully capable of continuing to fly rotor flight on my electrics, but I want to be in one radio camp and I just want it to be easy. And I want one of us to fly something different at least and whatever.

So I did sell some motor flight stuff. I'm going to keep at least one of the FR Sky transmitters for micros and other stuff. I don't know. You could fly the M2 with the new V-Bar stuff. Yeah. Although the micro receivers are in short supply right now. More on that later in the news. So yeah, but I might keep one because I can fly bigger airplanes and stuff on other things that I have here in the house. So anyway, I sold the helicopter. I let the M5 go.

okay we knew that was coming though right like yeah it's coming i wanted to keep my fleet small and make room for what i'm hoping is in 2026 a raw 580 or sorry an ill goblin pro 580 will appear that's cool and i also other than the vcontrol mother load bought something that i couldn't say no to have you ever had that one model like early in your hobby time and you sold it used and you regretted it forever

And you were like, man, I got a chance to get another one of those. It's the one model I want back in my fleet. No, I've never had this feeling. Every model that goes away. I'm like, cool. I'm getting something new now. I got one.

uh what i it was my first kit build that i ever put together myself and i was just happened to be perusing some of the for sale spots and i caught a ridiculous deal of a guy trying to sell an xl power 550 so the original xl 550 which i love okay great flying helicopter actually autos really well for a 550 and It's just a fantastic beater for a ridiculously cheap price. So got it for pennies. It's in...

I mean, all of the frame and all that's fine, but it needs new, like, everything. Like, the head and tail need to be completely rebuilt. There's just slop and old bearings of them. All of the, like... pretty much all the bearings in the helicopter are shot or should be replaced so slowly working my way through it picking up some spare parts online picked up some spare parts from brian

at one time just about everybody in atlanta had one of these helicopters it was like everybody had an xl 550 so there's lots of spare parts around so kind of enjoying doing a retro build on that like you know

bringing back old memories. And I have all of the gear here. I have all the ESCs, servos, I have a motor for it. So it really cost me like nothing. I have an FBL for it. So couldn't say no. so slowly working on that with zero pressure that might be my winner build so get the xl 550 back in there have a really nice custom

for a while ego drift for the team guys was making custom canopies for xl power helicopters so i have an old specter v1 ego drift canopy and i have a 550 ego drift canopy so i'll be able to put that on this helicopter and make it look good So I'm stoked. That's going to be a lot of fun. That's cool. And it's a beater that I have all of like $100 and $200 invested in. Yeah, that's nice, dude. Not sweat it at all.

and fly some cheap FirstRC blades on it and just have a good time with it. So that's what I sold. That's what I bought. And then all the V-Control Evos and the radio and the...

god i would love to see how much money you're spending rf module so that you know i don't lose connection and the long batteries so i can fly all weekend and not think about it so yeah that's me hey well i have some good news for you what's that When you walk away from your radio now, it'll turn off and you don't have to worry about your battery dying. I actually disabled that feature. No, you did not. Why? I don't know. I don't like that it shuts off.

Because it freaked me out on the bench when I had it on and I was doing stuff. And then it turned around and it was off. And I was like, did I do that? I wish mine would go on. I wish my radio would turn off. I hate it. But, you know, I check things like the battery level. Good for you. Hey, do we get to increase that number of weeks between Alex crashes? Oh, is it my turn? Yeah.

Because, you know, we got the sign in the front of the show that says it's been, I think, four weeks now since Alex has crashed. Four weeks. We can continue. I have some shocking developing news here. Uh-oh. I know. If I have only flown the M2 in four weeks, does that count as a no-fly? No. I mean, kind of, but no. Not officially. I have been wearing myself out.

by fitting it in. You know what I mean? Always running out at lunch, fitting it in. And I finally was like, I'm not going to do that anymore. My life has been super relaxed feeling since then. Aside from that...

I have this little problem where I had agreed to sell my L-Goblins. And at the last Funfly, one of my M2s had kind of crashed. So it's not my M7, I'm sorry. So I took... the the guy was like i really want the old goblins so i took them apart which by the way taking apart a helicopter that you're not excited about taking apart is

Not something I would like to ever do again. Like you were sad that you're letting it go. I just did not want to do it. Yes. Yeah. I didn't want to get rid of those. Not yet, at least, because I was waiting for... I have on order the new ultimate kit from XL power. And I'm just waiting on that to be delivered. So that hadn't come in yet. And I was like, so I'm going to be down to one functioning helicopter when I do this. So I have hanging on my wall.

Yeah, I have my two M7s still hanging on the wall. One of them, it's just the main gear stripped. The lower frame is cracked and the blades are broke. So it's still hanging on the wall. I don't know. With non-functioning helicopters on the wall? It's technically in the corner. Technically in the corner. I have my newly built Spectre 700 V2 Nitro and I have...

I have a story about that. So that's on the wall at least. Wait, where's your Spectre Electric? I don't have it. Oh, you let that go too? I sold it also. Yep. Oh, wow. Yeah. Somewhere along the way. I've been... I've been selling stuff and it feels really nice. I'll look on the wall and be like, oh, I don't have that much maintenance to do. Aside from that 1M7. Kenny, to answer your question, I'm kind of not fixing because I don't feel like fixing it without the new parts. Oh, I gotcha.

the m7r parts so i'm not gonna spend time wrenching on it only to go oh i wish i had the updated stuff like i keep thinking it's gonna come out and it's still not out where is that machine by the way more on that in the news Yeah. Okay. So there was a last week I was like, all right, dude, I have this itch. I haven't been out in a month, like to the actual field to fly. I'm taking my new nitro out and I'm excited about it.

When you guys build a new machine, Kenny, you already did it with your turbine. You build a new nitro. You get everything set up. You have the idle set and all that stuff. And do you typically go outside and start it before you go to the field to make sure it's going to run?

Yeah, I always take it out and at least with the blades off or something, make sure the throttle's idling right. Yep. I don't really rev it up. Usually I'll just make sure I can switch the switch and it's going up and I know it's working and stuff though. I do it every time. And I like dial the... idle up so that it starts spinning a little bit with the blades on or off. I've always done that. And I've never had it not work. Okay? Like, I have had lots of Nitro success.

It always starts when I get into the field. I drove out to the field with this thing. It's my lunch break. I have one hour at the field. I spent one hour trying to get the motor to start. That's the worst. Like a dead glow plug or driver? Well, I thought maybe it was that, but the thing is beeping correctly, so I pull the glow plug. Okay, this is before I left the field.

I'm sitting there looking at it and I didn't bring all the tools that I normally have. I don't know why I'm made in a machine. And I find in my car like a Leatherman type tool, you know, that folds up. Nice. And there's a wrench, there's pliers on it. And so I can use those to get down and pull the, my glow plug driver that's attached to it. You know, the alligator clip. Yeah. And when I reached down in there to do it, well on the Leatherman's.

You know, when you open the jaws up and then you close them toward the part on the handle, there's a snipper built into that. Oh, you snip the wire. I snip the wire. Yep. Glow plug to no plug. Yeah, no plug. So I at least wanted to know, do I have glow? So I pulled the plug and then... those two wires together and tested it out and i could see the glow plug was glowing so cool i go home i solder it back together get everything going and now i'm now i'm on the driveway with my starter like it's

running for way longer than it should trying to get this thing to go like i'm pissed off at it this is actually today i did this to this new motor or this is a new to me but i knew that it was a good motor This is my first experience with a YS-96. Welcome to the club. And my YS-96 has the, I have the parts from Gregor.

absolute cnc to do an os carb conversion so it has the normal carb i'm used to dealing with from os and i pull the glue plug out and i'm like there's no freaking fuel coming out of this engine there should be a ton of fuel in this engine at this time and I pull the tubing off the nipple that goes into the carb, and I turn the engine over and fuel spewing out. Okay, so there's definitely compression getting in the tank.

It's pushing fuel but there's no fuel going through the carb into the engine. Bad regulator? Pull the regulator apart. I clean it out. I put it back together. There's no fuel coming into the engine. Oh man. Okay, so I pulled the regulator apart like five times because I eventually just pulled the needles out and I had the regulator in my hand and I would turn the engine over, but it wouldn't force fuel out of the regulator. Like no fuels coming out of that thing. Huh.

And so I finally just take, take it all apart and I blow air through the nipple, which by the way, when you get nitro in your mouth, it just makes your mouth tingle for a long time. Like I don't, I hate that. Yes. Yeah. And air blows through and it's fine. I put it back in the machine and voila, it freaking starts right up. Oh, man. It was just stuck, I guess. It was just stuck. Yeah, when they said a long time, they get stuck.

I don't know how long this engine sat. It was also, you know, a new build with the clunk that was new and I don't have a filter on the line going to the carburetor. Maybe something got in there. I don't know from the clunk. Funny story, though, I'm glad that it didn't start at the field. I'm sitting there playing with the idol, watching the blade, you know, no blades on it, but just watching it turn. I'm like, cool, everything's working. And all of a sudden, whoosh.

One of the tail blades goes flying off of it. It lands like right in front of me. And I was like, oh, I guess I never tightened those nuts up on the table. Oh, man. Alex. How do you do that? It takes that one or a hand-tighten and just moved on. Yeah, if it had been in the air, dude, I would have lost it.

Like the tail would have vibrated itself to death. Yeah, I guess it could have been worse. A good thing happened on the table. Yeah. Losing a helly on a maiden like that sucks. Yes, it does. Glad you caught that.

You know, I was just going to say, actually, interrupting. It was, Nick, if you've already gotten X amount of five, four, five, six flights on that Nitro, it's time for you to go back over all the bolts on that, too, on the BK Nitron. I did give it a good look over the other day after the first flight, and then again at the end of that day, and then the other morning I looked it over. Tail rod bolts and the balls that go to your...

the grip arms and stuff like that, the ones that can just randomly thread themselves out, you know, on the swash, check all that stuff that's moving parts. The carburetor regulator comes loose a lot of times on those OS motors. Make sure that that bolt's snug on the needle, like all that stuff.

no i yeah we were talking about nitros and i was talking about how great it was running the other day and i was like you know a new nitro is like a new girlfriend it's like it's an awesome experience you go through all this fun stuff for the first time together

All these amazing things happen in the bedroom. You're just like super stoked. It's the best day ever. But you know that it's only going to last so long that eventually you're going to settle into whatever and disappointment is just down the road.

That's funny, dude. We got to make some videos with Alex, though. You got to have a comedy show with him snipping the wires off the glow plug and then slinging the tail blades across the field. God, dude. It was funny because I wasn't even mad about that. I was like, oh, that was stupid. I was too busy going helicopter won't stop. Can't sleep. I want to start. I want to start. So yeah, I'm excited to get out though. Like I can't wait. So this weekend's coming.

Hopefully it's below 50 degrees, Brian, and the weather will be great. Dude, nitros in that 55 degree weather are so good. Yeah, so good. Yeah. But that's my update. I don't have a whole lot. I'm dying to get out and fly because it's been a while. I have enjoyed my break from not forcing myself out to the field every second. And my family is happy that I'm not doing that too. So cool. It's good to have balance.

Yeah, it's been a good balance. Dude, I think you added number 52 to our crash list. I don't think we ever mentioned to tighten up blade bolts nuts. Yeah. Or check your helis after Maiden and make sure all the bolts are good. You know, what if we went back in time a month and we said... A month from now, Nick's going to switch to V-Bar and Alex won't have flown much. Right? Right? Would anyone believe us? No. Nope. Wild. Well, you know, all in the name of fun.

All right, should we do just only a little bit of news this week? Let's do a little bit of news, and then we'll dig into more fun. Let's do the news. And now, with all the news from inside the RC helicopter hobby, we bring you... The Rotor Report. All right, so we got some updates on the Blackout Mods turbine helicopter conversion kit from XL Power or for the XL Power Ultimate, I should say.

the first batch is due out by the end of 2025 and pre-orders will be opening soon the retail price for the kit is estimated to be around 3 000 us dollars which puts us well into the boutique small batch model category right So only a small quantities will be produced and the priority is to reserve one first. Email the folks at blackoutmods to get on the list. I don't think it's on my list, but it could be on somebody's list. It looks pretty awesome. It looks amazing. Spectacular.

I can tell you from experience, his kits are top-notch. So, yes, they're expensive. Yeah, I have seen your monocoque. The electric one is pretty cool. Yeah, and they're handmade. and not just handmade they're handmade works of art like it's just yes they are the design is beautiful and the craftsmanship is there as well but it's a it's a one-man operation so um wow a lot of love and a lot of hours go into making those oh yeah

All right. Mikado has mentioned that it's working on a new micro receiver to be used in micro helicopters. So the previous six channel model is now out of stock pretty much everywhere. And there's no ETA on the new receiver at this time. If you need a workaround, you can purchase the seven channel receiver. Here's the deal. You remove it from the case, remove the servo pins to save some weight if you want to.

and then heat shrink it, right? Mercado's also announced a new satellite receiver for the V-Bar Evo. This additional satellite would plug into the V-Bar Evo. adding antenna diversity and redundancy. The satellite connects via a standard servo connection, which can be extended up to one meter or three feet if you're in the States, for large models.

That's cool. Beats having to string two Evos together like he used to. Totally agree. Yeah. All right, guys. Did you know that Kyle Stacy flew for SAB for 13 years? 13 years. I didn't know it was 13 years. I didn't know it was that long, dude. Wow. So, Kyle Stacey, which, if you're not in the United States, is a popular guy around here. He is my, an art.

our own podcast. He's our dream baby daddy. And he has just announced that his, his plans to step down from the SAB team. Not, not that he's unhappy with SAB. He had a nice post that just said, Hey, I really enjoyed our time together. It's been a long time partnership, but I'm ready to step back and just enjoy flying is what is really going on. So it seems Kyle wants to be able to try other brands and have a bit more freedom in the hobby.

I think we can speak for everyone in the hobby and say Kyle has been an amazing ambassador for SAB and look forward to seeing what he is up to in the future. And we'd love to have him on the show and talk about what he's got going on.

Absolutely. I look forward to that. Yeah, me too. Maybe that's next episode idea. I don't know. I don't know. I was talking to him a little while ago. He was saying he'd love to come on the show again, so we'll definitely have him on. Okay. And yeah, best of luck to you, Kyle, man.

That's a great run. I don't think you can find many other pilots who've had runs like that with a brand. I guess Dahl. Kyle Dahl was with Mikado for how long? Sorry. The names that came up on this note was Kyle Dahl and Alan Szabo, I think, are about the only ones. the others. Zabo, yeah. Yeah, he's been with them forever. But I'd definitely be curious to hear his input on other birds that he fly, other brands. I mean...

been stuck with one brand for 13 years. I mean, it's going to be similarities amongst those models within that one brand. But now that you step out to another brand, you're going to find some different, you know.

more agile birds, less agile birds, whether they're going to be the flight characteristics of different brands versus what he's been flying. I would love to hear his opinion. It'd be great to have him on the show within the next couple of months after he's flown some of these birds to see what his opinions are. Yeah. I mean, if you look at guys like Ben Stark who flew for a line for years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

left and decided not to pick up a sponsor. Now he flies everything. He's flying Goose Guy and SAB and XL Power. And that kid is having a blast doing that too. So hopefully Kyle gets the same thing out of it. Absolutely. I've talked to Kyle about this already. He is not planning on joining another manufacturer. He is enjoying the hobby, flying other things, and having fun. Yeah. Good. Good for him. That's awesome. Well earned. Yep. Congrats, Kyle.

It's funny, though, that you say that because someone already reached out to me and said, I heard Kyle Stacey's flying for Tron now. And I was like, no, did you read the words he wrote? Did you read them? Gosh, man. I have no doubt that every major manufacturer at the very least is going to throw him a phone call or an email. I'm sure he's going to do his own thing. So good for him. Yeah.

All righty. OMP Hobby has announced some delays on the production of the M7R kits. Those of you waiting... Oh my gosh, I'm never going to fix my helicopter now. Patiently for your... The kits. Kits, not parts. Just kits. Oh, okay. Parts might be longer. So waiting on their kits a little bit longer.

They post on their Facebook page with a photo of a lot of parts all ready to go. And the quote, our team is working at full capacity to complete production of the new MS-7R. And we'd like to apologize for the short delay. The first kits will be ready to ship soon. and will arrive at your local dealers shortly after. So that's the latest update. Do you know that little emoji of Sonic the Hedgehog tapping his foot? That's you. Patiently waiting.

Or more of a Mr. Bean standing in a field kind of being. Okay, fine. That's fine, too. Speaking of delays, Soxos has announced that the... I still can't say this. Paul 7. That's it. Their new Nitro has some delays with some quality issues, which they are fixing some of the parts in the first batch. Soxos is having those parts remanufactured to ensure the quality of all the kits. We don't know exactly when, but...

Hats off to Soxos for stepping up and saying, hey, we can't release this. We're going to fix it before it gets into the hands of all the users. Flyers and pilots, not just users. For you addicted hobbyists. Users. Oh, here's some cool news. So Venture Blades has announced a new F3C blade in the works. The new blade will be 732 millimeters long with the CG at about 55% mark, which is great because this is the typical size, like I mentioned before.

Of most F-3C pilots, they fly about a 730 millimeter blade. So this is awesome. The blade features a very unique shape. There's a picture on Facebook. I think Mr. Steven Kloss posted. Looks really cool. But more details are a bit, you know, scanned at this point. So we don't really know, but we'll definitely keep an eye out on this for you guys.

I've reached out to Steven to see if, you know, perhaps, you know, throw a set towards a brother so I can test them out for him. I would love to give him some feedback in the areas of like hover and aerobatics and auto rotations and stuff. So.

We'll see, but they look amazing. I can't wait to try them out. Yeah, they're visually striking as well as, you know, hopefully perform well. Yeah, yeah. Anybody see anything cool lately? Any Roto-Replay candidates this week? I feel like I've kind of taken a social media break, so I haven't really seen a lot. I've also kind of been taking a social media break. I haven't seen anything. Yeah. I tell you what I have seen is tons of likes still on the Jeremy Strickman.

overspeed crash video. Oh, really? Is that still being watched? Yes. Still. Still to this day. If you look at our Facebook page, all the notifications are like, this person is now following you. And it's all traffic driven by that one video. Absolutely. The number of shares goes up daily. It's hilarious. Maybe not for Jeremy, but for us. He's happy about it too. He's good. Yeah. All right. It's been a while, but I think the rage is on.

And Nick is going to bring us this week's Road to Rage. Nick, what's going on, man? Thanks, Brian. Here's what I want to rage about. You know, winter's coming and there's already crap brewing online. And I was tempted to rage about that, but instead. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, this is exciting.

It's not exciting. I love reading this stuff. I'm going to have to get back on social media just to read, read this stuff. No, it's why I took the break. Cause that thing made me grumpy. Anyway, that's not what I want to rage about. What I want to rage about is Mikado's prices. It's funny because when you said, can we have a real rage? I was like, oh, are you going to rage about how much money you're spending? That's awesome. Yes, I am. And here's why. The cat's out of the bag.

you can create the hardware at least and i know that software needs to be paid for for a damn competitive fbl in the form of rotor flight and sell it for 50 so we know the hardware 80 now right is it for what no the nexus units are still cheap um okay maybe if you start adding the receiver for the nexus xrs even 70 okay yeah that's what i mean built-in receiver yeah yeah but i think if you're going to

you know obviously software development takes time but we know the team at mikado isn't huge wait nick nick in a metal case also and a metal case yeah get me started So that's $50 comes in a metal case or $70 or $80 in a metal case with a built-in receiver. Whereas Mikado, you get a plastic case instead of a metal case. You do get the built-in receiver.

And if you want features like Rescue and Pro-level features, you're going to pay even more. So now, essentially, that brings the price up to around $350 for an FBL. And you need two pieces of tape to put one on each side of the Flybarless case. You don't have to do that anymore. So for $350 versus a $50 FBL that in the air is just as good, if not a small percentage better, potentially. I think it's time...

And I know that other competitors on the market, especially those with closed ecosystems, are working on lowering cost of entry across their platforms as well. Now that they're realizing that radios like the TX16S that are in the... you know fire there are the fr sky radios in the five to six hundred dollar range so i think it's time and i know we're here with tariffs and all other challenges and material costs are rising for mercado to relook at its prices i think that

you know, a $1,400 radio that now I need to add another $100 so it has a dynamic transmission module that I can get all of those things in an FR Sky radio.

with an eolrs module for 550 bucks versus 1550 oh and now i gotta buy a bigger battery because you're gonna sell it with a tiny 7 000 milliamp battery when it should have a 14 000 milliamp in it to use it as it should be intended so mikado i think people are on to you man and i think you got to drop your prices i think it's it's starting to become too much and i think it's starting to upset some people including me and i paid the cost of these things knowing what it was

and you know i was not surprised by these costs i knew what they are but it just got me thinking that there needs to be a new v control release that includes the region model pre-installed with the 14 000 milliamp battery right out of the gate for one

that price i think needs to come down to somewhere between 800 and 1200 and i think the fbls should come with pro and rescue right out of the gate and i think you better drop those fbl prices to 250 or less or you're going to start losing customers so Uh, I'm sure I'm going to catch some hate for that, but you know what? It's just, I don't know. When you can sell five rotor flight FBLs with antennas for less than the cost of one FBL from Mikado.

Something's up. That's my road of rage. You said it all, man. You said it all. You said it all, bro. I just got one word for you. Jarmody. That's it. Period. Boom. You're done. I know. And there's a cost of doing business and a cost of software development. If everybody else can do it for less, so can they. Yeah. And that's a point I'm going to touch on, too, when we get into our topic, Nick. But that makes perfect sense, bro. All right.

Not a lot of, I don't think we have any new events on the list, but we'll just whip through a few reminders. Oh no, it looks like Brian's got something in here. All right. Let's do some events, some quick reminders. What do you got? Kenny, kick us off. Okay, we've had it a few times here, but we'll keep it going. Dates for the Spring Fling have been released April 22nd through the 26th. Features night flying, pilot's dinner, and on Saturday, and also $45. We'll get you in the door.

Cool. So the Thailand Heli Blowout 2025 will take place November 29th and 30th at the Thang Sikan Flying Field in Don Muang. Bangkok. This event will feature world-class pilots like Tariq El-Sadi and Kitty Koh, MCK, Duncan Vassian and Fabian Kloss and more. Come out and see your favorite pilot. There'll be some exciting competitions as well as some cool, stunning night show with fireworks. Danny Wang has been really promoting this event. So go to his Facebook page or the...

Thailand heli blowout.com website for more details, but that sounds amazing. Yeah.

And another reminder for the season closer, the Torches Gators Winter Bash, which this year is the second weekend in December, December 12th through the 14th. Also featuring an Urcha Cup competition. You can get details of that on the Urcha website. And... registration online just opened so 55 bucks early registration gets you a t-shirt and there's going to be some night flying some light up heli flying the urchin cup and just a great club great people great fun so check it out

I bet I don't forget to take my jacket this time. That's funny. It's like in Orlando, like, oh, it's Orlando, but man, it was cold. It was cold on that Saturday morning or whatever day it was last year. For sure. All right. That's all we got for the news.

Hey, everybody, Nick Maxwell here, and you are listening to Rotor Revolution RC Podcast. All right, this week's main topic.

rotor flight a year later and i don't know if we really kept track of the time some of us have been flying it it's only been a year but has it has it been at least a year for everybody i think so yeah i started this journey at the no just a year because i did this remember i went to the rodeo and i was like shocked yeah that's when i did it was a year ago i can't believe it's been one year i tried it feels like five

kind of gave up and then at winter bash i got reset up again thanks to archie and hack i remember in love with it yep so we kind of thought we'd just circle back and see what we've learned how we feel about it now and what we plan on doing in the future and kind of where the four of us differ on this and just kind of have a conversation about it. And hopefully that gives you an idea hearing about people's real world experiences with it over the course of a year if you want to try it or not.

and go from there so the first question i started thinking about when i was thinking about this topic is do you feel like you're over the learning curve and i feel like kind of all four of us should probably answer each of these so

Kenny, do you think you're over the learning curve? After all the time, mostly I would say like 80% of setup and things, yes. I still don't do a lot in the filters stuff, so I still, that whole, you know, start to... finish of filter tuning i need to get into more which will still leave another open chapter of learning more with rotor flight also and just adjusting stuff even finer you know yeah

Ryan, I know you've dug into trying to figure out filters and black box. Do you feel like you've overcome most of that learning curve? Still fighting through it. I do. There's still a lot of finer details within there that I don't know if I need to touch a lot of those tunable areas. But for the most part, I guess the...

From the basic setup to getting your governor set properly to setting up filtering properly and getting the gyro set up with that and then tuning your PIDs. I think I am. I think I am. I could take a bird. You know, granted, I can copy a model over, but I do go back and start kind of fresh from those four points to make sure that I get it set up properly. And, you know, and it took me to get to, you know, it was a big learning curve. But when I had that.

aha moment and I felt like oh cool I know it now and I understand it so yeah I mean I think that and you know guys and I will say this too go to chat GPT And ask it a question about Rotoflight and things that you're trying to accomplish. It doesn't necessarily know the answer, right? It formulates its answers based off of, you know, what the communities put out there. You know, we have answers scattered.

over the place. You're right. Yeah. I've been using AI a lot for stuff. It's not always just, you're not going to get the direct answers sometimes, but there's enough information there that it will trigger the information that you need. Absolutely. It pulls all that stuff into this one little page for this one view, this one.

answer and response to help you. So I'd leverage Chad GPT a lot to help me out. I even tell, Hey, Chad, I fly F3C is precision flying, blah, blah, blah. It knows it. And I'm like, you know, how can I, you know, fine-tune my bird using the Rotor Flight system. And you'd be amazed at the answer it gives me. It goes and pulls this stuff from various websites. It finds Facebook posts. It finds, you know, information from the Rotor Flight website itself.

and other forms and it gives you it formulates a nice answer for you to help you set up your bird so it's things like that that helps me say you know get away from trying to cherry pick an answer from various sources and find the best one resource that's going to help you do it. And that's what I've done with ChatGPT. So I know it's a long overdrawn answer, Nick, but...

I'm not completely over the learning curve, but I feel very comfortable setting up my bird and tuning it. Yeah. Okay. What about you, Alex? Setup, 100% fine. You know, I can do it relatively easy. tuning i feel like i have become a copycat where i just copy what i was using on the other one and put it on there and change just a few things and it works pretty good so i have kind of given up on

learning more about filter tuning at the time. I don't feel a need right now to do that. And part of that is taking away from what I've learned. I've had the opportunity to talk to Jawan a lot and he differs in his tuning method from some others. but it's worked very well for me and I'm very happy with it. So I'm just using the same filters on everything. It works great. Yeah. For me, I got to say for 90% of setup, I'm definitely over the learning curve.

But other than that, I'm just not. I feel like I have had such a good time in rotor flight because I'm good friends with Archie Harris.

the tune for my rs6 came from archie the tune for my old goblin pros came from archie the tune for my spectra that i started with even on the three blade came from him like all of my bass tunes have come from alex or kenny or archie or others in my small circle so do i feel like i have experience taking you know a fresh rotor flight setup and tuning it myself no meaning do i do i know what to set the filters to no i borrow them from other people

um yep see and i you know i know what black box does in theory but i've opened it up and looked at the data and i don't know how to make heads or tails of it or know how to turn the data into actionable changes in the fbl

And part of that is what's driving my decision to switch is because I feel like I don't know. I'm not self-sufficient. I'm not over the learning curve, even after a year. And that's something to keep in mind. And it's OK to borrow tunes from people. I'm not trying to shoot that down. I just.

a lot more independence and when i fought with the low head speed bank not fought but when i worked on the low head speed bank on the eel goblin pro and i figured it out myself i started thinking if this happened in rotor flight when i've gotten here this quickly and i think the answer is no so i'm not over the learning curve for sure and maybe jumping into specific questions this soon was not the best thing do we want to just kind of this is cool

this is cool yeah i think it is cool yeah or do we want to like just kind of broadly describe our experience i'd like to make fun of you a little bit more before we move on but oh yeah you can no i i like the questions nick i mean i think they're okay okay and then we just let it flow whatever yeah whatever comes out of it and honestly like it's humbling to me that people i think i'm as smart of are figuring this out and i'm not and i'm like dang it

Like, these guys can figure it out. I think I'm as smart as they are. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't think I'm as smart as Archie. Let's talk about time dedication, Noah. You don't have the time to go to the field. And sit there for hours and analyze data and change little things and look at it and fly and look at it and fly. I'm sorry. Family life, work, not possible for you.

yeah yeah yeah it's a lot more time involved totally get it absolutely and so for me i think in in the beginning for me too i mean coming from futaba where it's Rotoflight-like, right? You still have the ability to kind of fine-tune all of these attributes. You know, the learning curve wasn't as great for me.

coming from Futaba as it would have been from like someone coming from V-Bar or Spectrum where it's a little bit more simpler, right? So it took me about three weeks to really just, and I want, and remember guys, I wanted to learn this from scratch, right? So yeah.

The SXC setup was out there, the model setup, the transmitter. But I told Arch, I said, Arch, let me try to learn the system first. I appreciate what you guys have done. It's just copy and paste, drop it on this section, and you're good to go. But let me learn first. And so I took three weeks to a month to really learn it. And it was frustrating, like it was for me with Futaba. Very frustrating. But it helped me. And so when I sat with Archie now and said, well, show me this.

That's sexy stuff that you guys have done. And he showed it to me. I said, oh, that makes sense of why I did it that way. And you did it this way. Okay, I get it. Again, some of those aha moments for me that, you know.

helped me learn and you know and it's progressive so once you learn one thing it helps you with another thing and that's we're going to talk about the frustrations but that was one of my big frustrations like dang you know you got to know this part before you can really get to this part

uh, to tune. If you don't know that part, then you're not going to be able to tune this part properly. So that it was a, it was a bit of a learning curve. And I, and I, it, you gotta have the time to sit down like a student, like a. college student and just, you know, read the book, read the manual and learn it. Yeah. Sometimes it's like what Nick was saying, like when he was driving home and then he realized why something didn't work, you know, with the V-bar switches.

The rotor flight's the same way. You'll be doing stuff, you know, and if you don't get it, you can just take a break from it and either you'll be going to sleep and all of a sudden you'll be like, oh, I know what I did wrong. Or, you know, you can just something like red.

like you're saying we'll trigger it and that's kind of you know that's part of the whole rotor flight journey too is it's rewarding when you finally figure it out you're like okay this was not you know not a difficult now i know what i'm doing at this stage you know right right interesting

So would you say in your average, you know, couple of weeks in the hobby, are you pretty much at this point just enjoying flying rotor flight or are you still feel like you have obstacles to overcome? Like you're still trying to learn things. Like, are you fighting little battles as you go through your time in Rotor Flight? I'll start. For me, I mean, I'm cool with where I am right now and how I've tuned, what I enjoy doing.

is watching some of the other pilots talk about how they have their birds tuned. Some of the F3C guys, they use really high gains. I don't use that high of gains. I mean, I'm okay with having my setup, you know, again. playing with the PID settings and even the feedforward attribute there. I mean, there's so many different combinations of how you leverage that depending on your flight stop, if you're in hover mode versus aerobatic mode.

And I got it where I'm pretty locked and it feels great, my bird, my wraith with what I have. So now I'm just enjoying flying this thing. I don't sit back and play with tunes. Only time I sit back and go. tune at the field is depending on wind conditions. So I cranked up the RPM a little bit, gave myself a little bit more pitch in Tampa. I got home, up at the field, Nick, when we flew, I had to just kind of scale it back down because it was...

too pitchy with no wind. So those are the only little things I do now. I don't have to go to the filters no more. My PIDs are great. They're consistent. So if I look at the data on a graph, I got the same. you know, charted graphs and data points today that I had, you know, three, four months ago. So I'm good. So I'm cool. I feel the same way as I am right now. Yeah. I feel like the answer is in the question, you know, just like you're saying, I'm enjoying.

flying them now and just enjoying them but i like that fact that the learning you know there's not just sliders and you're done kind of thing there's always so many parameters that you can go back And tweak and tune things per helicopter to a finer extent or to a totally different style if you want. Or you can still go back in there and revisit the filters and then adjust stuff on there to see how that works.

you know, interacts with like, say the nitro vibrations or, you know, just anything you have going on. Yeah. What about you, Alec? At this point, I'm just like... I'm just flying and enjoying flying. I'm not worrying about it, but my number one goal in flying has always been learning new maneuvers. For now, my machines fly perfectly.

when i'm trying to learn a new maneuver that maybe i see something then like kenny said i'm enjoying the little small things that you can do i'm learning i'm still enjoying that learning so yeah cool yeah

I feel like I've spent, especially with the Nitro recently, a little too much time trying to figure out rotor flight and not focusing on learning things in the air. So that's been a thing. But let's talk about transmitters for a second. And I think...

I mean, in fact, we've had some requests to do a full-fledged episode on transmitter options for rotor flight or just for... non-ecosystem type radios like fr sky versus radio master etc but we all i think have tried multiple radios for rotor flight as part of our journey I experimented a lot. How are you guys feeling radio-wise? Are you happy with where you've landed at this point, Brian? So I use the TX16S, and I'm very satisfied with it. I've held other...

Rotor Flight Enabled or HTX or Ethos Enabled radios. And this one feels pretty good. I mean, it's pretty comparable from where I came from, right? Initially, I flew a T-32 MZ from Futaba. That was probably the best feeling radio in the world. I mean, the thing's just amazing. But, you know, getting rid of it and going to the T-16 IZ.

from Futaba it was a lighter radio so you guys saw where I modified it a bit I added some weight strips inside and I made it feel pretty heavy like that 32MZ yeah and so it felt good and so You know, moving over to Rotor Flight and with the TX-16, it felt good. It felt like my TX-16, my 16iZ. You know, a lot of people that use Futaba like the feeling of the TX-16 because it's a similar. Yeah, it feels really good.

Absolutely. So I like it. I think it serves its purpose. I think the software is decent. That was one, again, where I wanted to learn how to set up a model from scratch when I first started learning it. That was the most frustrating part to me was the transmitter versus the rotor flight setup. So totally different, you know, especially coming from a Futaba world. But, you know, you get used to it. You learn it again and it's...

Okay, you do this particular setting here versus there from Futaba, etc. But it grew on me, you know, and it feels good in my hands. And, you know, I'm looking forward to the... the updated model that hopefully comes out early 2026 with the faster processor. Definitely looking for the more speed out of the software that's in it, but I like it. I like the TX16S. It's really good for me. Alex, what about you? I am happy with the Ethos radio feel in my hands. I am so tired.

of there constantly being updates to the software. Yes. I haven't updated anything because I'm just tired of doing it. It's been okay for a while now. I think they kind of slowed down with them recently. I know that mine takes forever to connect to models sometimes, and I've heard there's a software update for that, but I don't care. I'm tired of updating software, and I'm not doing anything, and I'll just deal with it the way it is.

I'm really interested in the new TX-15. I love the way that radio feels in hands. I am not interested in learning Edge TX at all. No interest. That's what's stopping me from doing that. So yes and no. I think part of the problem is that as long as there's a new radio out there to try, I'm going to want to try it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just as guilty. Yep.

I'd say on the FreeSky Radio, I'm happy with it also. And kind of like what Alex said, yeah, there's some things where it's slow sometimes hanging up here and there, but that's... It's not like it was. I would say a year ago or so, the Lewis scripts were super slow, you know, and there was issues. It's better. It has gotten a lot better over time. And same with the TX-16. I downloaded, I have like the newer.

I did it just to try it recently, and I haven't done any updates on the FreeSky radio, but the TX-15, and then the newest Lewis Grips for Edge TX have the icons now and stuff, kind of similar to what you're seeing on FreeSky as far as selecting... things in rotor flight so even on that side it's gotten better too and yes the radio does feel better in in my hands but i still even flying them both the same day or just trying them back to back i still like the screen being on top

on the free sky radio and stuff too so it's like it's hard to switch over to the opposite way where you can't see the screen if you're using a neck strap yeah i do miss that yeah

Speaking of that, Nick, how do you feel about that? Because now you're using a lower screen and everything vice versa. Yeah. I mean, the screen should be on top on every radio because it's awesome. I was literally doing this.

the dance the other day with vcontrol where you're trying to hold it up and of course the piece of data you want to see on the lower screen is right behind your transmitter strap as you hold the radio up and you're trying to negotiate the radio and angle it so you can read the rpm or whatever it was

You want to send it to me and I'll flip your screen around on the V control upside down and then I'll switch the channels and your sticks over left to right and you can try it out that way. That would be awesome. That would be awesome. What's stopping us? But Alex, I mean, you nailed it for me. The amount of radios you have the option to fly with a rotor flight is a blessing and a curse because it's not like you can go into, you know.

radio control superstore and pick up all of the radios so you can try it at a funfly and and you can always ask people at a funfly if you can hold their radio i mean some guys might say no but i doubt it i'm always happy to let people you know feel what it's like because how else do you know if like it ergonomically fits your fingers until you hold the thing so free sky and htx radios and all these so lots of choices on the radio side but it's exhausting to set them all up the same way

The problem with this question is, though, that I feel like we're comparing mostly to V-Bar, maybe Spirit or something else also. But I was never really happy with the way the V-Control felt in my hands. It feels clunky and plasticky.

you know so it'd be nice to have options at the same time not having an option is nice because you just forget about it oh well it is what it is and you move on yeah i will say like holding v control again jumped right into i did put sticky 360 ends on because i just prefer those but so it's all been easy for me to go back and forth between even the the amount of throw on the stick being slightly different has not bothered me it's been pretty seamless to go back

and yeah the updates is a lot but you don't have to do the updates so it's not really fair to blame rotor flight for that right you could have a working lewis script and just call it done and never touch it again it'll continue to be compatible for a very long time it's like none of these updates are forced but it's just part of the world the rotor flight world where you want to like get the latest and greatest and it becomes a cycle that you get into but

the opposite side of that and there's tons of great choices and there's tons of ways to pick the radio for you with the switch spacing that you like the screen placement that you like the stick travel that you like all of those things like totally the the world is is your oyster to choose from so

A lot of positives there. Alex, speaking of positives, if you had to pick like the single strongest positive of your time with rotor flight, what would you say is the best reason to fly rotor flight? I mean, it. is the best performing system i've flown to date so it isn't is that what you're looking for what are you really asking me whatever you think is the single most positive thing about rotor flight and your experience with it

For me, it's just the flight performance. It's unmatched for anything I've flown. How would you compare it to V8? Close. V8 is close, but it's still not. V8's... collective control is jello-y compared to the way you have with rotor flight rotor flight is collective is so instant and when you stop it doesn't kind of float around where you told it to stop it's just better

Yeah, I want to experiment with the digital gimbal settings. Right now I'm running them on normal and just getting used to everything kind of as it was. Because I've heard that improve some of those things, but I haven't tried that yet. I hope you're right. So I just looked, and it's been 24 days since the Ethos suite has been updated, and it was just improved memory usage. So not too many. The updates are becoming a little more spread out and smaller this time.

What about, Kenny, what about you? What's the biggest positive for you with Rotor Flight? Just, I think I feel more confident in the system, too, honestly. Like, I mean, I've never really had failures with old stuff like Spectrum that I was using. or Futaba really but I've had instances where stuff's happened just because of something in the wrong port or something doing this or that where I've had odd stuff happen and with rotor flight I've never had any odd instances or

scary moments like where something didn't work as I intended it to, you know, with the radio frequency or the channels or nothing. I've had really good experience for the past two and a half years. Okay. Brian?

Honestly, for me, I mean, when I first heard about this system and that it was open source, I said, well, I'm going to let people play with it first and see how it goes. And I saw great progression on it. I mean, it's like, holy cow, it's... gaining traction and then the the units came out the nexus came out the radios came out and i saw the price and i was like holy cow you mean to tell me for a fraction of the cost of

a Futaba system set up or V-bar set up, I can be in the air flying like one of these systems. Let me try it. And so for me, it's the cost hands down. I mean, that's, it's amazing to have such a. a great system granted I mean it was a bit immature I mean it's brand new it's only a couple years old we have to give it some credit for the growth that they've had over these last two years

And yeah, you're right. I mean, it is frustrating with the software updates, but again, I think it was still developing at that point and it still is, but it's such a solid system now. And you won't see those upgrades for a long time now unless there's really something wrong. But the biggest positive for me is the cost, hands down. I think I got another one. So and after I've learned how to read.

like the black box data, data tuning your bird versus just trying to fly it and physically see the characteristics of it and tune it off of that. I fell in love with that. And I can tune my bird just from the data instead of having to go and, you know, look and see if the tail's wagging or whatever. I can see that in the data and make the corrections and fix that. So that's.

for me, has been the two biggest positives, the cost and being able to tune my bird just by the data. This is interesting to me. I love that we've all picked a different angle on this, none of which is ever planned. Not what I can expect it either.

And I have a different one altogether on what I think the biggest positive of rotor flight has been for me. And as much as I'm tired of having to rely on it, the community is the biggest positive for me. I love that. That's a great one, Nick. That's a great one. Yeah.

i love the like the rotor flight discord everybody you know reaching out and helping each other um just a great community of pilots yeah you know answering the same questions over and over again but you know continuing to help new pilots get into it and

and passing it back you know pilots who figure out rotor flight are then helping out the newbies as they come in and kind of cycling through that the sxc community you know guys like archie hack and sean you know you know publishing tunes for folks to use working with the rotor flight developers as well on trying to improve the product overall and just whether it's guys at the field helping each other or at a fun fly talking about rotor flight tuning

I just feel like the open source community around RotorFlight, the developers, how accessible they are is unique to RotorFlight. And it's awesome. And I mean, not that I'm leaving, leaving it, but I will definitely miss it for sure. Yeah, that's a good one.

And then, of course, conversely, and I think we've kind of hinted at these, but maybe there's something we haven't talked about here. Brian, while you're on the mic, what's your biggest frustration with Rotor Flight? I got a couple. I think... The longer than normal learning curve is pretty big. I mean, you have to be, you know, and I'm not, I don't want to offend no one, but.

saying people are not as intelligent, but you got to have some high level of intelligence to know this system. I mean, it's not written in an elementary way for just the mass. population of pilots to understand. It's tough. It's a hard learning curve that takes a lot of practice and a lot of reading to get. So that's one of my frustrations on it.

And the other one is, yeah, the fact that it takes so many parts to make it work means more maintenance. We talked about the updates. I mean, you got to have the road to flight software. You got to have HTX for those with the TX-16s. You got to have the... The Express LRS, make sure that's updated. You got to have the lower scripts update. So it's so many different pieces to make this thing work. And they all work together. So you got to have the right version that works with each one.

And especially if you're in the middle of like a hot update, because there's a hot fix out there that that affected two of the pieces. Right. And you got to figure out, oh, shit, which which version do I need for each one of those pieces? That's frustrating.

But I'm glad we're kind of at a point where it's kind of flatlining a bit and the updates are really far in between. But yeah, those are my two biggest ones. So a longer than normal learning curve and then just so many different parts to make it work. Yeah, totally valid. Kenny, single biggest frustration with a rotor flight? Frustration. I would say more in the beginning was trying to figure out your aux channels and things like that, you know, to set.

changes the settings to where you can use it like an s bus channel or the telemetry port you know for other stuff with a switch and and now it's a little bit easier because you have like the presets that they have in there which actually gives you the CLI command to type in which makes it a lot easier but that was kind of frustrating and doing the like you had trouble with the nitro throttle in the beginning that was a little bit tough like trying to

It would be nice if they could rework the throttle to where there is just a separate part where you can checkmark that it's nitro and it gives you a little bit easier.

way to set up the throttle in the first place just to uh i mean now you have to do a certain thing because it's ran through like a beta flight type software in the beginning but there may be a way to alter it with some presets maybe for nitro and then i mean other than that i haven't had that many issues i actually kind of like how the receivers on the lrs bind and stuff so it's not been bad on that front it's mainly just a few details like

you know aux settings and switches and then ports stuff like that okay so more of the technical setup type things uh what about you alex what's the thing that frustrates you the most All I can say is the update thing. The update thing. That's it. Constant updates.

The update fatigue is real. It's significant. Even if you don't do all the updates, just hearing about them all and evaluating them. If you're not into Rotor Flight and you're like, what are you guys talking about? Updates are cool. Imagine... That you updated all your stuff and then you go out to the field only to find out now your stuff's not communicating correctly. And so you got to figure it out again. Or you got to update because you just saw there was an update on the way to the field.

Or you updated one part, but you didn't update the other part of your radio until now they don't talk correctly. It's so freaking annoying. Yeah, there's a new ELRS version, but now my telemetry doesn't work or whatever. If you lose all the integration, like I flew when I first started with it, I used a Spectrum SRXL2 receiver and no telemetry or nothing. And I had fun flying and I just didn't have...

all the bells and whistles and stuff on my screen but you can really just grab any transmitter receiver and use like s bus on there and fly it you know you just have to use your laptop and stuff so it's usable but all these updates that come in all the time are things you know if you check the update what it is

it might be something you want. You're like, now we have this, now we have that. It's just add-ons or slight fixes for the last update. And it's not really mandatory, like you guys said. It just depends on if you want it. So you don't have to stress out on getting updates unless you're having an issue.

I mean, you could go back two years ago and load that rotor flight file in and fly. You just may not have all the goodies you have today. Yeah. I got to say my single biggest frustration other than, you know, having some of all of the ones you shared as well, but is. cli voodoo so the cli section of rotor flight is is essentially like kind of code type portion where you can save your file into a text file

with all of the values in the flybarless unit. But you can also enter partial pieces of information into it to program things in the FBL. And there are presets now that will do things like, hey, I want to run 15, 20 cyclic servos.

you know please tell rotor flight that you know you can paste these bits of code in there my problem is and this came to be an issue in the nitro is that there are lines of code you can type to say change an aux port to run pwm as a servo instead of a different function um and those lines of cli code are hidden sort of in the facts or in the you know tutorial sections of rotor flight but some of them just you only know if you happen to ask the person who knows them yeah and

So there's not like a central resource of all of the CLI codes and with a good explanation. Yeah, they're not all in one place. Some of you do have to like have an idea of what you want and like search on Discord or somewhere for those keywords and you'll usually find it.

But it's frustrating to me when I ask someone, hey, I'm having trouble getting my throttle servo to work on the Nitro. And they're like, oh, here, put this line of code in your CLI. And I'm like, well, how would I ever know that? It is non-intuitive. You would never be able to guess that line of code. It's not like there's a list of options you can look at and say, which one did I not check?

And I got to say that's been one of the enjoyable parts of going back to V control is all of the options there in the radio. You can see what you can turn on and off and it all just is there and open and makes sense. And that's with most radio systems.

That's been kind of a frustrating thing for me is essentially, and what that boils down to is having a problem and not even having a clue where to go to fix it other than rely on the community again and having to reach out for help all the time can get frustrating.

Anyway, summing all these things up, positives, negatives, other things, are any of you tempted to try something else? Do you plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future, Alex? I mean, for me, until something comes out that flies better. flying is flight characteristics are my number one thing if you mostly care about flight characteristics you're going to choose you know what flies best and for me right now this flies best so yes okay brian

Yeah, I'm going to stick with it. I think there's still more, you know, in the realm of F3C tuning and flight characteristics that we still haven't pinned down yet. So I definitely want to help the community get to that point. We're constantly communicating about F3C settings. I mean, Futaba has always been the F3C king of systems, right?

Everybody wants Rotaflight to fly like Futaba. So how do we do that? Which attribute do we touch and change settings to and blah, blah, blah. So it's fun to work with the community of F3C pilots too. to figure out how to make Rotor Flight just as good. So, yeah, I'll be here. Is Futaba better for F3C? I think it's better because it's been around for the last...

20 years for F-3C pilots, right? It's been around for a long time. And so you have a new system, again, that's a fraction of the cost and can still produce some of the same... flight characteristics as some of these other fbls and systems and you know we're just still in its infancy and we're trying to learn how to get it there so let me rephrase the question too though purely in the air

so no programming no cost no other factors purely in the air performance wise in a competition as since you've flown both and competed with both what do you think is better in the air oh i love rotor flight in the air oh over futabo for sure okay Cool. Yeah. Kenny, I'm guessing you're planning on sticking with it. I do, but you know, I am, it's kind of like how you are, you got the V bar, but you have that, you know, rotor flight set setting there. I'm done that with many things, the icons.

three or four different things over the years, three digits, V-Bar, Neo's, everything. I'm willing, like if there's something new that comes out that catches my eye because of certain features or whatever, I'm definitely willing to grab a different unit and give it a try with either.

the same or different transmitters but yeah for the foreseeable future i see myself still using this and getting a few more updates and then seeing how it goes from there you know it just keeps getting better it seems like yeah Obviously, the answer to this question for me is yes, I am tempted to try something else and did. I'm going back to V-Bar. But I also thought long and hard about Spirit and Trinity. I didn't go with Spirit because I feel or Trinity.

Because I feel like they're both young systems that are still evolving, lots of updates. In Trinity, it's very in its infancy with telemetry and things like that. And I don't want to give up any functionality. Spirit's much more mature, but it's still a different ecosystem that I don't necessarily understand all the variables and would still, you know, like the time I try to rely on great guys like Dima and others to learn it. And I just, I wanted to not spend that time.

That's why I went with V bar over spirit or, or Trinity is I just wanted, I wanted the easy button. So yeah, yeah, it's my answer to that question. But speaking of reaching out for help and things, you know, all of us have certainly put ourselves out in the public eye.

in talking about rotor flight often on the show and in other places which means all four of us i think get asked for a fair amount of rotor flight help and if anyone's uncomfortable answering this question by all means you don't have to but Has that become taxing for any of you that rotor flight is so help intensive and therefore once you're out there as, as getting decent with a rotor flight, you get asked for help a lot. I will say this. So for me, I feel like.

I'm paying it forward as I reached out and got so much help from folks, especially with Archie. Poor Archie. Thank you, Archie. Shouts out to Archie. Oh, hell yeah. Shouts, hugs. Yeah. All of that. But I feel like I owe it to pay it forward. And I think this is a community. This is open source software. It's an open community of pilots that help each other out. And that's... what i signed up for so for the fraction of the cost for being practically free and now that i know it

And I have this voice here on this platform that gets out to hundreds, thousands of pilots. People are pinging me like all the time. I get emails sometimes. Hey, Brian, can you call me and explain something to me? And I'm like, sure, you know, if I have the open time to do it, I pick up the phone, I call them and I help them out as best I can. And if I don't know the answer, I know who knows the answer. And we just kind of bounce around like that.

I don't mind. It's, you know, can it be taxing? Of course, anything can be taxing. But I feel like this is what I signed up for. And I love to help people out. Matter of fact, I just Mitch Booth. Shout out to Mitch. Mitch and I on the email chain right now, getting him started. He has a Genesis and I sent him my Genesis file and, you know, he got set up with the...

SXC transmitter set up. And now he said all the lights and bells went off and started ringing and he's super happy. And that made me feel good. I'm like, I was able to get Mitch up and going with his Genesis. So I love it. I love helping folks. I'm cool with it. Yep. Anyone else want to weigh in on that? I don't mind. I mean, yeah, I'm with you, Brian, paying it forward. At the same time, this, just like update fatigue, I got...

I got tired of answering those questions so much so that like a recent friend of mine started flying it and he would call me and I'd be like, what? Like when he, now when the phone rang, I was like, uh. which how freaking mean is that you know like dude people help me out in an enormous way so

Yeah, it's the same way. You've got to point people in the right direction. You don't want to give them all the information because it's like you're starting over with a book. You're starting a chapter one. So if you know where they're going with it.

maybe give them some links to the pages with the information or just enough to get them going. And then maybe have them revisit after they've looked over, you know, they have to kind of do some of their own research too. They can't, you can't hold somebody's hand and make it, make them. Absolutely, bro.

Yeah, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them read the Rotor Flight book. Yeah, that was my biggest frustration about getting asked for help by folks. It's not people asking for help. It was, hey, do you know how to do this? Well, did you watch?

Bert's or Jonas's or I started to watch the video. Did you watch the video? And like, no, no, I haven't watched any of the videos. Have you read the tutorial on the Rotorfly website? No. Did you ask in the discord? No. yeah going through the rotor flight in tutorials the best way in the beginning just to get an idea of the direction everything goes in the order yeah i mean you gotta if it's an fbo you're interested in you gotta put in the work and i think it's

It's hard watching the same basic questions get asked over and over again that are answered in these really good resources. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, so folks who want to get into it with low effort can be a little frustrating.

I think if you do like I did and read enough stuff for a week or two, just go through the tutorials and things, then you can get enough of a setup going to where you're just going to only be asking a few small details that you just weren't clear on, you know, just set up small stuff. You won't be asking like...

the, the beginning items, you know, that are just like, there's shows that you didn't even, you're just trying to fish for all the information, which really, it's just, it's frustrating for people who've done it for a while because you get asked the same questions like Alex said. Yeah.

How do I get my radio to talk to the FBL? Well, that's covered in like a ton of great videos. So stuff like that. I think we may have just kind of answered this question, but are there some folks out there that just shouldn't try Rotor Flight, even though the price pulls a lot of people in?

Yeah, if you're not willing to put in some of the effort. I mean, you don't have to put in, it's not like reading a novel, but you do have to put some time in here and there and kind of gather the information because it's not going to gather itself, you know? That's right. Yeah.

Also the people, I'm sorry, but if you're not someone who does this hobby moderately regularly, I don't think, I think the guy who flies every other weekend, every other month, I'm sorry, not every other weekend, every other month should like maybe do something easier.

I don't know. Yeah. If you're just looking to grab the helicopter off the shelf and go out every two or three weeks and fly, then it's not for you because you're going to be out of the loop enough and you're probably not looking to sit there and.

get that detailed you're gonna forget dude how did i i forgot what i did like how do i do this yeah yeah totally agree with that i feel like we should close with just a statement of thanks like number one to the guys no doubt who developed rotor flight who brought it from its infancy to where it is yep so guys like archie

and hack and you know tons of others who dug so deep into tuning and database tuning and then shared that information with all of us um yeah and you know we all have that person that helped us get going with rotor flight and without them We wouldn't be flying it, honestly. I wouldn't be. I wouldn't have enjoyed trying it. So thanks to all of those guys. Yep, definitely.

Thanks to guys like Rob Thompson and others who write the Lewis scripts for the transmitters. I mean, it's a whole community effort. I feel like by complaining about constant updates, you're like putting these people down. And that is not the case at all.

So happy that you guys are continuing to update and make it better. I'm simply, as a user, talking about my experience in that it can be tiring if you're not... remembering everything and understanding how things work all the time right you also have to keep up on it i mean one of the nice things about you know the v control not to keep talking about that but turn my radio on and it goes hey there's an update and you go oh look for the update

oh yeah, I'd like to install that. Click and it grabs it on my Wi-Fi and I'm done. That just doesn't happen in Rotor Flight because it's a piece in parts. Because it's open source and because there's too many ways you can experience it. So it's a, hey, I heard.

Or I saw on the Discord there's an update. Oh, now I got to go find the GitHub link to download it. Then I got to figure out where to transfer that file, how to unpack it, how to install it, and then how to configure it once it's on the radio. So there's a lot more steps involved.

Since we get all those updates all the time and there's no mandate, but on the rotor flight configuration app, there is a donate button. So if you're liking the updates and things are working better in the right direction. And you sold V bars and you got all this leftover money. You can toss them a little change here and there for all their efforts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or if you've got a friend that.

just sold all his rotor flights and had to buy like five evos and transmitters and you want to buy them a coffee or a beer to say you know hey man i hear you got no money Nick's putting a request for cash back. Like I, I no longer have that extra. Anybody else? Any, any other thoughts on road flight you want to share before we wrap this up? Yeah, just, you know.

Again, thanks to the community of folks that have been involved that have contributed to this system. It's a great system. I love it. A lot of folks love it. You know, it's like a marriage. You know, you fuss and fight. you know, with your spouse every now and then, but you love each other. You know what I'm saying? And so we love Rotor Flight. It's awesome. The juice is worth the squeeze. The juice is worth the squeeze. Absolutely. Absolutely. So thank you.

All right. Well, with that, I think we can wrap up this episode of the Road to Revolution as always. Thanks for listening. Hey, Nick. Oh, yeah. What do you got? Do you have one more? Since Alex interrupts the intro, can I interrupt the outro? I mean, I would kind of be like...

Sad if you didn't, Kenny. Okay, so that's perfect. One more thing. I do have a rotary play. It is Nick Maxwell just posted this as we were recording the 700 Ill Puma Nitro, and he's ripping it around in the backyard, and it's actually a really cool flight. It's really smooth, but... Very fast and precise. Take a look at that on his page. Nice. Did you just confess to coming through social media while we're recording? Yes. It's literally playing. It was playing earlier. Right now.

That's the only way I get these breaking news things mid-show. How else would we get this awesome news? That's going on your end of year evaluation. This has happened many times. That's how I come up with one more thing. You're not getting paid this year. That's awesome. All right. Well, now we can fittingly wrap it up. So as always, thanks for listening. All the things swag store.

email contact info links to our facebook page you can message us at our facebook our email address all those things are available on our website at rotor revolution dot live check that out thanks to all of you who have supported us in the swag store

And thanks to all of you who message us, encourage us, post on our Facebook page. Let us know you're listening. And if we're doing a good job or send us questions or topic ideas, all those things. Thanks for all of that. And that's it for episode 55. See ya. See ya. Take care, everybody. Yeah. Thank you, guys. And thank you, Nick, for editing this. Do I leave that in or edit that out? Yeah, you can leave that in there. Bye.

This concludes this episode of the Rotor Revolution RC podcast. To learn more, stay in touch with the team, and to join the revolution, check out our Facebook page at facebook.com. rotorrevolutionrcpodcast or find us on the web at rotorrevolution.line. Help us spread the word and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. For listener questions, advertising inquiries, or to reach out to the entire team, email us at questions at rotorrevolution.com. Thanks for listening.