Greg Takacs
Veteran
Location: Fort Worth, TX
| Hi,
I'll try to answer at least some of your questions with meaningful answers.
(1) With gyros, the "elasticity of diminishing returns" is the case, which means that the most expensive gyros will not give you the biggest bang for the buck. And there are gyros that will cost you more and not be as good as some others that cost less. If you want the biggest bang for your buck go with the Futaba GY401 and you'll be happy for a LONG LONG time! Generally better gyros will not drift, meaning slowly turning the heli one way or the other, and they will hold the tail locked in a position better than others. When you're in forward flight it is not that big of an issue, the real difference shows when you'll try to fly backwards and sideways.
(2) Governors are NOT gyros! The two are totally different things! Gyros will hold the tail in a fixed location, governors will keep the rotorspeed at a specific RPM. That is all they do. As you're applying more pitch to the main blade it needs mor ethrottle to bear the load. The governor helps giving the right amount of throttle to the pitch so the RPM won't change. It works the same way when you take away pitch, you'll need less throttle. The pitch and throttle are mixed in the radio transmitter for all helicopters, and with a 5 point curve you can get it pretty close to have the same rpm throughout the pitch range. The governor makes it easy so you don't have to set up a proper throttle curve, just set the rpm and forget it. I don't use one and noone at my field does, I think if you know what you're doing you don't really need one, I haven't seen the big fliers using one anyway.
(3) The blades differ in many ways. Rigidity, weight, airfoil, chord width just to name a few. Genereally rigidity and uniformity is the biggest thing you'll get from flying glass or carbon blades. They are mor expensive than wood ones, but perform better. If all you do is hover around and do some forward flight, chances are you'll not see the difference. Glass blades are almost as good as carbon ones and they cost about $20 less. I fly with carbon blades now, but I've flown woodies for the longest time on my Raptor.
(4) To decide which heli is good or bad, is a hard and complicaed task that I do not want to get into. However I can tell you that you can break them up into 30, 46, and 60 size machines. The main difference is the engine size and the blade size between these machines. What the big ones can do and the little ones can't is all the power hungry maneuvers. Meaning consecutive flipping/flopping , pirouetting maneuvers, and autorotations. The 30s just don't have the power to weight ratio to be capable of doing them. They will be able to do most of the maneuvers but you will not have much reserve, if any, if something goes wrong. I fly a Sceadu 50 and I'm super happy with it. The 60s are not only stronger than the 30s but they're also bigger which makes them a little more intimidating but easier to see in the sky. Autorotations are a lot easier with the longer blades as they store more energy. The 46/50 class is in between the two.
(5) As far as price goes, you can go as high as over $2000 for a scale helicopter, just for the chassis, no engine or electronics. It will not be the meanest, baddest 3d machine, but it will look beautiful. If you want the ultimate 3D machine you're looking at around $3000 fir a complete setup. Look at my website under "What to get" and check out the "money is no object section". Again, most expensive might not be the best!
(6)Hitec is an R/C manufacturer that sells radio crystals for their receivers. I'd imagine that's what a Hitec Single conversion crystal is. Futaba uses dual conversion on their receivers while JR and hitec uses single conversion.
You had some excellent questions, I hope I could answer them to your satisfaction! |
