Vintage

A good way to protect your cables when installing the electronics into a RC Helicopter is to add braided sleeving.   This also gives a nice professional looking installation.

 Here I show how I do this.

 So in this example I am using an antenna extention for my Spektrum radio.

 How do you tie cables to the helicopter frame when you only have one hole.

You could go through the hole and over the side of the frame,  but this would not be very neat or often practicle.

So here is what I do.  Imagine the piece of plywood with the hole in it shown below is the the helicopter frame.

So I received my new JR 12x radio this week and tried it yesterday on my Airstar Mongoose.

  I was already using the JR X9303 2.4 Ghz radio with this helicopter so all I had to do was rebind the JR R921 receiver with the 12x.

The first thing that I noticed that was different to the 9303 was the way the throttle trim works.  On the 9303, you can set your throttle curve to 0 if you like and the throttle trim can bring it lower than o to kill the engine.  On the  12x the throttle trim will only bring the  throttle curve to a minimum of 0, so you have to adjust your throttle curve to take account of this.

I have been asked on many occasions since I started flying the Airstar Jetcopter SX, "What is like to fly it?" and "How does it compare to an electric or nitro powered R/C helicopter?".
I'll preface my answer by saying that so far I have only a dozen flights on my Jetcopter so I'm am far from being an experienced turbine helicopter pilot.

Of course the first big difference is the intimidation factor from flying something different and so expensive.

Actually, turbine helicopters are not more difficult to fly than their nitro and electric counterparts, however, they do fly differently. Although I have never flown full scale helicopters, I understand R/C turbine helicopters fly almost identically to highly maneuverable full size helicopters with a rigid rotor heads such as a  BK117 or Westland Lynx. You have loads of power to do just about anything, but you do have to anticipate things like sink rate and load factor on the rotor in tight turns.

With the Jetcopter weighing in at 22 lbs, you also have to make sure you are always ahead of the helicopter with collective and cyclic controls because of its inherent momentum.

The other flight characteristic is that when hovering, because of the hot exhaust gases rising from the back, there tends to be more lift generated on the rear of the rotor disc than the front.  That can mean that the hover is a little less stable than with a non-turbine radio controlled helicopter.

On the Airstar Jetcopter SX with the JetCat HP5 turbine, once you have started the engine and have established a stable idle, you put the turbine to full power which remains fixed for all flying, as in full scale and you fly the collective (pitch).

Finally, of course one of the biggest differences compared to non-turbine powered helicopters is its sound and smell which always seems to guarantee a crowd!

While preparing for the maiden flight of my Hirobo Super Cobra, I could not get the engine started.  After checking everything, I brought it back to my workshop for further investigation.

Even after removing the mechanics from the fuselage my investigations yielded no results.  Eventually I decided to remove the engine from the mechanics start the naked engine on a test stand.

 

As I have not used this helicopter for a long while I decided to sell it to a fellow flyer at the park I fly at.