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DATE: Dec 6, 2012 TIME: 7:00 PM PLACE: Gym

Come FlyWith Us Sometime

ALEXANDRIA RC FLYERS ESTABLISHED 1987

Interested in becoming an ARCF Member? BENEFITS INCLUDE

Maintained Flying Site Two Grass Runways On-Site Restroom Shaded Picnic Areas Instructional Flight Training Regularly Scheduled Fun-Fly's & Area Lake Float Fly's plus Seminars & Workshops

Hey, its Turkey Month! Now comes the season of putting on a few pounds and resolving to lose them after the first of the year! Of course, if you have a winter building project to keep you busy, you might spend more time in your workshop and thus less time munching holiday goodies, (unless, of course, you tend to take goodies into the shop with you. ) Also, doctors tell us that hobbies actually reduce your stress levels and blood pressure too! There! You see? Building model airplanes is actually good for you! Put up a tree and stocking in your shop, (like I do!) put on some Christmas music, and youre not only having some healthy fun, but youre ready for Ol St. Nick to boot! Now you just have to finish your letter to Santa and try to stay on his Nice List until Christmas! Well, what are you waiting for? Head for that Man Cave and get busy! Speaking of Man Caves and building projects, construction has actually commenced on the new 43% Carden Edge 540 kit, as you can see by the photo of the engine box structure currently being assembled. You can also see by the length of the plans laid out on the 10 foot long work bench that it is, admittedly, a bit on the large side. A fun and exciting project though! I dont know how much I will get done by spring, but Im going to give it my best shot to at least have the framing done and the airframe ready for covering by the time the snow melts (assuming that we get snow this winter?) I refuse to let work get in the way this year! On another note, as you all know, our monthly meeting facilities at the Technical College are no longer free. At last months meeting, we decided to simply charge a $5/night user fee to fly in the gym to cover this cost. If on any given evening too few folks fly to fully fund the night, the club general fund will make up the difference. This approach will allow us to cover the $35 per night fee that the Tech College is now charging us without having to raise dues on the general membership, which, given our relatively small membership, would require a substantial increase. Please remember to tuck a fiver in your wallet before coming out to fly on Thursday nights from this point forward during our winter/indoor season. So come on out and have some fun with the group! See you all Thursday, the 6 th! Gym is open from 6-9pm. See you all there! The Prez.

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Programmable Mixing
Most of you know that I started modeling a very long time ago (Shortly after the first dirt was formed, and just after man discovered fire, I believe.) Back in those days, while transistorized proportional radio was big news, (no more vacuum tubes!) things like End Point Adjustment, Dual Rates, Exponential, and Programmable Mixing had not yet been invented. Oh the horror of it all. Endless hours were spent in tedious rituals such as trying to find just the right combination of servo arm lengths to achieve a throttle linkage that allowed both idle and full throttle engine operation without stalling the servo at either travel extreme while still allowing the engine to be stopped by applying full low throttle trim. We sometimes even actually cut planes apart and glued them back together to change incidence and dihedral angles in an attempt to correct for roll and pitch coupling problems. It was barbaric! Then came the first programmable RC radio circuits. These modern marvels (Sorry History Channel) were built from HeathKit projects, (How many of you remember Heath Kit???) and could be installed into your radio to expand its capabilities. The boards came as kits. You soldered the circuit boards into the desired transmitter circuits and adjusted the boards pots to set mix values, end-points, or dual rates. What would they think of next? Admittedly, things were still a bit crude, however, and you did need to be a bit of a craftsman to build, install, and adjust these new marvels. Then one day an amazing thing happened. ACE RC introduced the MICROPRO II transmitter. It had a mysterious device called a MICROPROCESSOR inside that gave the RC pilot amazing, god-like powers over the setup of his planes. We were saved! The only drawback was that the MicroPros one-line, LCD display and extensive menu loops meant that it was a bit of a bear to program without having a flow chart handy. The Japanese ultimately came to our rescue, however, with computer radios having large, multi line, graphic displays and canned/preprogrammed mixes built in. Unfortunately, the stigma of complexity continued to haunt the new radios, keeping many modelers from using them to their full extent. Thats where this article comes in. Today, mixing really isnt all that hard. Just go into the mixing menu and tell the radio what you want it to do and it does it. Easy right? No? Well, lets take a look. Most of you fly Futaba radio gear, as do I, so that will be the basis for our examples. Other manufacturers are very similar, however, so you should be able to adapt these principles to JR, Spektrum, Airtronics, HiTec etc, quite easily. Lets say that your plane needs a rudder-to-elevator mix because it pitches toward the landing gear in both right and left knife edge flight; A common mixing application. What we need is some up elevator to be mixed in when rudder is used. Next time you fly knife-edge, remember about how much Elevator control you had to introduce to stop the planes pitching motion so that you can duplicate that amount when setting up the mix later. (We will use 10% as our example.) Once on the ground, stop the engine, but leave both the transmitter and the receiver on. Now apply the amount of up elevator that you needed in knifeedge and observe and remember the approximate position of the elevator surface for later reference. We want to set up our mix to achieve roughly this amount of elevator deflection when rudder is applied. Now go into the transmitter setup menu and select MIX. Pick a PROG (programmable) mix. Change the mix from INH (Inhibited or off) to ACT (Active or ON). Next, select the MASTER or primary channel; Rudder, in our case. Now scroll down and set Elevator as the SLAVE, (the channel that is being commanded to follow the Master.) Next, adjust the mix value, (10%, for our example, remember?). Note that the mix percentage can be set to either a positive or negative value. This will determine which way the SLAVE will move then the MASTER is moved. In our case we want the elevator to move upward when either Rudder direction is used, so simply adjust for a positive or negative 10% mix as needed to achieve up elevator movement for both rudder directions. (You can fine tune the actual mix percentages after each flight until the unwanted coupling is eliminated.)

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The mixing menu will typically also contain several other options, such as the SWITCH option. This allows you to assign the mix to one of the radios switches, allowing it to be turned on and off when desired. Alternatively, you may set the switch option to NULL in order to keep the mix always active. The LINK option allows the MASTER to control a second SLAVE servo. This is needed if the plane has split elevator halves, for example, and thus two elevator servos needing to be slaved to rudder. In our example, LINK tells the radio to command the second elevator servo to also follow the MASTERs commands. The TRIM function tells the radio to apply any trim changes made to the MASTER channel to the SLAVE as well. In our example, we would obviously want both elevator servos to respond to trim changes in order to properly trim the plane. More advanced radios may also give you the option to apply TRIM to only one of the slaves, if desired, but this is seldom needed. More advanced radios also have CURVE mixes. A mixing CURVE means that the mix percentage can be varied along a series of points throughout the mix. For example, maybe our plane doesnt exhibit any pitch coupling in knife-edge until nearly full rudder is applied. With a CURVE mix, we can tell the SLAVE (elevator) not to move until the Rudder reaches nearly full throw. Or, if the amount of elevator mix needed were to actually decrease as rudder increased, a CURVE mix could allow for more elevator mix with small rudder deflections, and less elevator mix as rudder throw increases. Pretty neat, huh? (CURVE mixes are also routinely used for helicopters.) Finally, most newer radios have canned (pre-programmed) mixes for common applications, such as our Rudder to Elevator example. These canned mixes reduce the amount of programming work required. In many cases, all you need to do is plug the applicable servos into the proper receiver channels, enable the canned mix, and adjust the mixing percentages as needed. Most of the other variables described above are still applicable as well, but are probably already preset based on the intended use of the mix. Mixes can be useful in many other ways. For example, planes that need coordinated rudder in turns, such as Piper Cubs and warbirds, can benefit from an Aileron-to-Rudder mix that adds rudder automatically when aileron is commanded. A Flap-to-Elevator mix or a Landing Gear to Elevator mix can be used to add up or down elevator, as needed, to compensate for pitch changes induced by lowering flaps or landing gear. A Throttle-to-Elevator mix can be assigned to a landing switch to add a slight amount of elevator at idle to help maintain the proper pitch angle during landing approaches. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination! So, what are you waiting for? Get out that computer radio and start using it to its full potential! As always, feel free to write or call with any questions. Ill be happy to help with any problems that you may encounter. Jim

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Blades New Nano

Last month, my lovely wife surprised me with Blades new Nano cpx heli for my birthday, so I thought Id share my observations with you in case you might be contemplating getting one of these for yourself. The first thing that you will notice from the pictures is that the Nano is actually somewhat smaller than the Blade mCPX 2. Thats actually a good thing. The smaller size makes it easier to fly in confined spaces, like your living room, and the lower head speed and lighter blades also mean that it wont do much damage to walls and furniture if it should get away from you. The bright canopy also makes it easy to see. So how does it fly, you ask? Well, not bad for such a small machine. The AS3X flybarless stabilization system makes it very stable in a hover, and on low rates, it is no harder to fly than the mCPX, (or even an mSR on high rates for that matter.) I even got brave and took it outside in about a 10 mph breeze and did a little 3D with it. Surprisingly, the wind really didnt affect it that much. The stabilization system is that good. This little guy IS somewhat quicker than its larger brother, however, so if high rates are turned on you WILL need to be a bit more on your toes. In fact, after tossing this one around for a while on high rates, the mCPX 2 that I used to think was a bit squirrelly started to feel a bit slow and sedate afterwards. Part of this is due to the fact that the Nano is actually more powerful and more maneuverable than the larger machine, believe it or not. While the mCPX rotor bogs down during hard collective inputs, threatening to allow the tail to unlock and spin the heli around, the Nano takes it all in stride. No significant bogging and absolutely no loss of tail control no matter how hard you push the machine,(within reason, of course) meaning that it can be flown much more aggressively. Flips can be much quicker and tighter and thus kept in a smaller area than the mCPX. Horizons marketing videos actually show this little guy doing stationary flips in a kitchen and a small bedroom. Of course the expert pilots employed to make these videos could probably do this with a full size heli in a room half the size, but it does show what the little heli is capable of in the right hands. Summary? All in all a pretty impressive little piece of engineering. Its stable enough on low rates to introduce folks to collective pitch in their living rooms, yet really wild if you want to be. I really like it! Jim

www.bladehelis.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=BLH3300 www.horizonhobby.com/products/nano-cp-x-rtf-BLH3300

CLUB OFFICERS
Jim Zabel 320-834-2072 zabel@gctel.net President Jack Cottington 320-762-5193 Vice President Glenn Fleener 320-763-8881 gtflee@charter.net Treasurer Wayne Stumpf 320-760-8542 wjstumpf@rea-alp.com Field Safety Jim Bridenstein (320) 859-5157 pjstine@charter.net Secretary Air Scoop, a monthly publication, is the property of Alexandria R/C Flyers AMA Charter #2439 Alexandria, MN 56308

Gym Schedule
Dec 6, 20 2013 Jan 3, 17 Feb 7, 21 Mar 7, 21 Apr 4, 18

Editors Note
If there are any items you are wanting to sell, trade or looking for please let me know and I can put them in the newsletter. Paul Waggoner