This is a fourth-hand report of a conversation a friend had with Bob Hunt, but there may still be some truth in it. Our new Executive Director is focusing on non-competition matters as a result of a recent AMA survey. The attention will be on ARF and RTF airplanes with a reduction of construction and technical material in MA. There will be more reviews of ARF's and RTF's.

Yeah, and all the reviews will tell us what great products they are.[>:] Technical content and tips are more important. I do understand that reviews will lead to more advertising, which is good for income. Hopefully the reviewers will be stand-up people that will tell us the unvarnished truth.

Just my 2c

Safe Flying!

Well, guys, hop on the internet and tell them your feelings in the matter. To me, that has always been a real advantage over the catalogue type magazines.
I can understand that they need more advertising but I like the tech stuff.


3dbob

As a new column contributor to MA I can tell you that semi monthly Battery Clinic column will be quite technical, but I hope on a level that can be understood by the non-technical. You, as readers, can guide how this column is focused.

Reviews in magazines are so biased according to who is being payed, I don't trust anything said in them. So much of it is just a disguised advertisement without any real, unbiased review. Some of it is just shameless.

What I find much more trustworthy is the consensus of posts here on any particular subject. If the consenus here is that a particular product does well or not, I've found that to be FAR more reliable and trustworthy. I wonder if the AMA magazine would be capable of providing real, unbiased, unpurchased reviews?

Josh

Try R/C Report. It's the only magazine I found that call it as it is.

Hey, Red, this is good news.
Looking forward to read your articles.

Max:

the problem with RCR is that they often engage in review of products for which the reviewers have no credibility.

Paul

Say, what ?

The reviewers have no credibility ?

What credibility is required for a model builder to write a report on their findings regarding any particular product ?

Kits ? All that's required is that the reviewer has built a few kits. Anyone can write about things like the manual or the plans not matching the bits and pieces, or about how difficult some particular sequence might have been, or whether the cut and fit of the parts was awful, or about how the hardware was rusty right outta th' box, and any number of other problems found during construction of the model.

You want Greg Hahn or Frank T. to write reviews of warbird kits ? Whatever for ? Either of those two gents might not mention having any particular difficulty with any of the construction sequences in a kit, whereas the average duffer modeler might find those same construction sequences daunting.

Methinks it is far better to have ordinary modelers write the reviews than to have world class scale model champs write the reviews. I don't care if Greg Hahn found the thing a snap to get in the air. I want to know if someone like _me_ thought the thing was a beast and where he had trouble fathoming the manual or the plans, or had trouble because the parts didn't fit well or were missing or were just plain lousy.

An expert can make a bad kit go together relatively easily with no loss of time getting ill-fitted or badly cut parts straightened out.

It's what the average guy thought about the kit that interests me.