freestyle
Veteran
Location: Redmond WA USA
| It's my understanding that that airplane and heli versions of the 8U-non-super are identical except for a few trivial details - the three-position (idle-up) switch is on the left side of the heli radio, and the right side of the airplane radio, and the heli radio doesn't have the snap roll direction switches. I think that's it.
I'd use the radio you have. I fly an 8U-non-super heli radio and it's got all the features a person needs. There are radios with additional features that are nice to have, but it's not missing anything important IMO.
I use my 8U with a 401 in the usual way - the channel 5 switch goes back and forth between HH and standard mode, and the channel 5 ATVs control how much gain I have in each mode. If you really want the gain on a knob, you can do a couple things...
You could use a p-mix from channel 8 (center knob) to channel 5 (gain). The drawback is that turning the gain up in HH mode will turn it down in standard mode.
You could hook the gyro gain up to channel 8 directly. The drawback is that you can't switch modes easily.
I've experimented with both, and either way is OK if you just want to be able to experiment quickly with different amounts of gain. Once you right the 'right' amount of gain, I think it's best to use channel 5 by itself.. that way you don't have to worry about bumping the channel 8 knob between flights and ending up with a surprise... 
Another thing you can do is turn on th-ndl mixing (a dedicated ch3 -> ch8 mix with separate curves for normal and idle-up) and plug gyro gain into channel 8. If you set the th-ndl curves to 0,0,0,0,0 and 100,100,100,100,100, then you can use the channel 8 ATVs to set your gyro gain, and you'll always have standard gyro mode in the normal flight mode, and HH gyro mode in the idle-up flight mode, and the gyro will switch modes automatically. It's kinda neat, I used this setup for a long time... Now I just use HH mode all the time though. |
