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Old 03-13-2002, 09:28 AM
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HarryC
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Default Which entry level computer radio?

MTT – There are reasons why the Tx offers both dual rates and expo. Although it looks like they do much the same job, if you push the Tx to earn its keep and make life easier for you then d/r and expo are used to do very different jobs hence the need for both. Obviously expo is a rate switch at partial stick movement, and though a rate switch operates through all movement it is best used as if it is a rate at full stick only. Now we can see that expo and d/r offer rates at opposite ends of the stick movement.

For example, when doing complicated rolling manoeuvres such as slow rolls, rolling circles and rolling loops, it is unbelievably difficult to hold in a constant small amount of aileron while also moving the elevator fore and aft and trying to think about the rudder as well. So you set the rate switch to let you move the aileron right over to the end stop and hold it there and then that thumb only has to think about the elevator. You can’t use expo for this. Therefore treat the d/r switch as a way of controlling full stick deflection rather than a way of softening the neutral and entire stick movement. You could use ele d/r to give the correct size loop at full deflection and then back to high rate for the spin at full stick deflection, this makes your manoeuvres more consistent than trying to adjust your thumb position each time as you go along, which you would have to do if using expo.

Expo allows you to tame a wild fun-fly for the few seconds that you need level flight, without having to switch rates in and out. When hovering (or trying to hover!) or do some other 3d manouvers, over-controlling is a major problem so expo helps smooth it out while still keeping full movement for those odd moments when you do need massive amounts of rudder or ele to catch the model from drifting too far out of shape. If you are flying pattern aerobatics, it allows you to keep full movement during manoeuvres yet have a desensitised neutral so that during the turnaround or a loop for instance, you can make very gentle and subtle alterations to heading or alignment without the model obviously twitching. Clearly you can’t be switching rates on and off all the time in these circumstances.

I would advise against the Futaba 6, it was the first one of this bunch to be made and was great then (years ago) but each new one that came out from JR then Airtronics and finally Mpx was much better. I have owned the Futaba and JR, and I would not touch the Futaba now. The Mpx Cockpit should be the winner by a long, long way, but it has one thing missing which I think is a fatal flaw – it has no freely definable mixers. I have never used a pre-defined mixer but used the free ones all the time especially to make knife edge mixes, throttle/rudder mixes, loop tracking mixes and so on. If you are going to spend money on a computer Tx, do not save a few $ and end up with the lowest spec because within 2 years you will have hit its limits and have to spend money all over again to get a better Tx.

Harry