Start with 100% standard RC gear, get a plane that can fly with a little extra power leftover to handle the weight of the additional electronics and you have a good starting point. You can use any transmitter out there that supports a trainer cord. You can find links on the web for PC interfaces to transmitters all over the place, some more effective than others. However using something along the lines of a Basic Stamp 2 as an interface would be more efficient. Because Stamps are excellent at dealing with RC signals, and can even generate the baseband (entire RC frame) from scratch with little effort. They also can interface to the PC using standard RS232 serial cables. The most expensive stamp will set you back 80 bucks and maybe 20 bucks less for a lower end one (Just don't use a Basic Stamp 1 module as their timer resolution is only enough to get 100 steps out of a standard RC signal not enough detail) The main reason I suggest a stamp, is if you become even moderately proficient at programming them (It's pbasic... piece of cake to learn) You can do mixing on the chip itself that would make what you can do with a computer transmitter seem like a joke in higher resolution as well. If you want to get truly exotic and you can find the info, you can probably generate PCM signals with it. Then it's just a simple matter of getting someone to write a program that will translate joystick input into a serial signal and send to the stamp for turning into a baseband signal to send to the transmitter to actually be transmitted. I do NOT recommend having the computer itself try to generate the RC baseband signal because windows can't guarantee reliable signal delivery, meaning you'll get junk out. If you have a good degree of technical altitude and the money/time to do it, shouldn't take more than a few weeks from start to finish. BTW, 2.4 gigahertz video transmitters for this kind of thing cost about 160. While the camera itself would cost about 160. An added afterthought, is that if you want to. The video transmitter I've seen has stereo audio as well, which you could use as a mono audio channel (for the hell of it) and a custom data down-link channel if you want telemetry data from the plane. You can get as exotic as you want, but the price goes up fast, so does the time required to assemble and test it. If you're serious about the project I'd more more than willing to assist in pointing you in the right direction for getting the equipment together. I've been interested in something along these lines with a Helli for a while, but I don't have the funds to start the project until late this year. [email protected] is my e-mail address if you want to contact me.