ORIGINAL: Troy Newman
Yes a throttle curve can fine tune the response. I find it better to have good starting point. This means that your throttle ATV, travel adjust, AFR or EPA however your radio calls it is symmetrical. That means that it has equal travel up and down.
If you have 115% on the high side you need 115% on the low side. This gives a balanced feel and a good starting point. Now you use the throttle curve to tweak to your liking.
I usually will increase the curve right off idle as most engine glow or gas has a sluggish response right off idle. So i increase it there...From this initial slight jump up I carry a pretty linear curve from there.
However if you don't set up a good mechanical linkage you will constantly be fighting yourself with electronically changing the curve.
Just my two cents.
Troy Newman
You are quite right Troy. I looked into this some years ago and arrived at the graph below that shows throttle area as a function of throttle position assuming that the linkage is set up so that 1 degree of servo rotation equals 1 degree of throttle barrel rotation. In a zeroth order approximation one can assume that power output is proportional to throttle area. If this is the case, the graph shows exactly what you describe, i.e., right off idle the response is rather sluggish, gradually becoming more linear as the throttle is opened.