RE: good backyard arf kits?
Wow, that's going to be a near impossible quest to fill, you might want to look into the Cox micro warbirds as they are very small but they require some flight experience to handle, the corsair being the easiest of them to handle, then again if your any good at building you could pic up one of the newer air hog planes and mod it to a 3 channel flyer, the new F-16 looks big enough to mod. Do you not have a scool or park near by you can go fly in, or even a big feild somewhere that you could ask the owner for permission to fly in
just as an example one of the feilds I fly at is the land used for county fairs and at one end the county uses it to store thier equipment
Good Luck