Ah, good timing. I've just been outside flying my new helicopter, more or less. I haven't crashed it yet, so I guess it counts as flying.
The thing you have to remember is that RC helicopters are perhaps the most complicated thing to fly you'll ever come across. More complicated than a real helicopter, in fact, and for the reason that you're not in the thing. This means your perspective of the control inputs changes with the helicopter's orientation, ie when it's coming towards you left is the opposite direction to when it's going away.
This is true of all remote piloted vehicles, of course, but helicopters are the worst because they are inherently more complex to control, and you have more things to do all at the same time. The reflexes need to be automatic, if you think about it you run into problems, and occasionally bystanders
There are several ways to start, all with pros and cons. You can certainly use a simulator, which if you have not tried radio control before is a fairly good idea. There are a couple of free ones, the best known of which is
FMS. It's quite basic, but has good physics underlying it and can teach you quite a lot. You can use it with a normal joystick, or can plug in a modern RC transmitter with the appropriate interface lead. This is probably the better option.
A much, much better simulator is
Reflex XTR. This one is truly amazing, and really pretty to watch. It comes with a USB to TX lead, and is only supposed to be used with the TX, although it can be hacked to work with a joystick. You could probably learn everything apart from the things you can only pick up from real hardware with this program.
Another way, at least to learn about the orientation issue with helicopters, is to get a cheap RC car or plane! Something tough and easy to use. Use it for a while, learn the left/right, forward/backward swapping around by heart, then move onto something more interesting. This allows you to get the reflexes engrained at low cost.
You can also bite the bullet and just start with a cheap heli and work your way up as you get better and bits snap off. There are a lot of very cheap, but in many cases fairly reasonable helicopters available from Ebay. The Ikarus Piccolo was the original mass-market electric micro helicopter model, but to be honest it's nowhere near as good as a lot of the third and forth generation knockoffs from the far east. The E-sky honeybee ones, for instance, are much better.
The cheap micro helis come complete with transmitter, batteries, gyro, receiver, servos, batteries, and so on, for about £100 up. They certainly fly, but to be honest in some ways are not the best thing to learn with. The problem is that the bigger a helicopter the less twitchy it is. That doesn't mean stable, necessarily, but the bigger ones don't react as violently to wind, control inputs, and vibration. This is because they are heavier, which damps them down a lot, and also have much more gyroscopic stability from the larger rotor blades.
The small cheap micro helis are usually fixed pitch, which is very simple but limited. A better one will be fully collective pitch, ie you change the pitch of the main blades to increase or decrease lift rather than the speed. This adds vastly more controllability, including the possibility of inverted flight, at the expense of complexity. The fixed pitch ones are very tough, and when you fly them into something they just pop apart, rather than break.
Remember, when learning, you WILL crash. Repeatedly. Get used to the idea, and budget for spares.
If you're thinking of something bigger, you have to decide between electric or glow fuel. The glow fuel ones have a lower size of around a 90cm rotor diameter and about 1.5kg weight, and go up to something pretty big. They have a very high power to weight ratio, but usually fairly limited fuel capacity which equates to about 10-15 minutes run time. They are noisy, produce a lot of smoke, and emit oil which needs to be cleaned up after every flight. They can only really be used outdoors, but will handle a lot of wind.
Electric ones don't have the power to weight ratio of the glow fuel ones unless you want to spend a LOT of money, but have many advantages otherwise. The run time can exceed half an hour on the bigger ones, they tend to be very quiet, need little maintainance except for repairs, and can just be switched on and flown. They're a lot cheaper to run, as well, since glow fuel is getting very pricey. A gallon of 20% nitromethane mix is about £25, and in a .30 size glow fuel helicopter would probably give about 10-20 flights. A lithium polymer battery for a medium size electric helicopter costs between £25 and £50 and will give several hundred charge cycles if handled properly, and the running cost is a little power to charge it. On the other hand, a good LiPo charger is about £100, so you have to factor that in.
Anything other than a ready to fly micro helicopter is unlikely to come with any radio gear, so you will have to get that separately. It can add up to quite a lot of money, but can be used in different models so should be looked at as an investment.
OK, so on to specifics. As I said, if you go for a micro heli, you can get up and running for about £100 to £140. This will certainly allow you to fly, but will take a lot of practice. On the up side, if you can fly one of the micros well you'll have no problem with anything larger. This is about the cheapest option.
Going up in size, a couple of good electric helicopter kits are the
T-rex 450x and the
ARK X400. They were both designed by the same guy in taiwan, they both fly very well, are completely aerobatic capable, and can be set up to be quite stable for beginners. I have an X400, and I think it's pretty well designed. There are loads of upgrades and mods available for both, and a lot of the parts are interchangable. Spares are very cheap, although the X400 bits are slightly cheaper than the 450X. You can buy both as fully assembled models, kits of parts, or deals with a motor and speed controller included. This last isn't ideal, as the speed controller that comes with them, while functional, is rather basic and I can't really recommend it.
For glow fuel ones, the
Raptor 30 is a very good one. You can get it with or without engine. The 50 and 60 sized version are the same, but larger and with bigger more powerful engines.
In addition to the model itself, you will require:
Radio transmitter
Radio receiver
Motor or engine (if not included in the kit)
Speed controller (for electric)
RX battery (for glow fuel) or flight battery (for electric)
4-5 servos
Tail gyro
Charger
For radios, there are many available, but I would recommend the
Futaba FF9. It is available for about £270, and will cope with pretty much any model you're ever likely to get. It's very programmable, and should last for many years.
A good receiver is the
Hitec Electron 6. It's small enough to use in one of the smaller electric helis, has very good range, far outside what you'll ever need, and is dual conversion hence very interference-robust. You will also need a channel crystal for it, for about £8. The receiver is about £30.
If you go for either the trex or the ark, a good basic brushless motor is the
Align 400L. You can get it for about £40. A suitable speed controller is either the
Castle Creations Phoenix 25 for about £50 or the
Hyperium Titan 20 for £35. A good battery
Thunder Power Pro Lite 3-cell 2100 mAh LiPo pack. This is capable of a continuous 25 amp discharge rate, and is one of the lightest pack of similar capacity, although not the cheapest. You will need at least an 1800mAh 10C (ie 18 A) 3 cell pack for either of the two helis I've mentioned.
If you're using lithium batteries, you MUST have a suitable charger. The failure mode of an improperly or over charged LiPo is spectacular, involving much smoke, flame, and noise. A good charger will keep the risk to an acceptable level. I have a
Great Planes Triton charger and can recommend it. It will charge pretty much anything, and will cost about £100.
If you go for either the Trex or Ark, you'll need three
Hitec HS55 servos and one HS50 (for the tail rotor). The raptor would need larger servos. A very good gyro suitable for either the electric or glow fuel ones is the
CSM SL560. It's about £100 and is a heading lock unit, which means that, properly set up, it will keep the tail pointing in the same direction more or less regardless of wind. This makes life a LOT easier, especially when learning.
In addition to the above, for a glow fuel heli you will need fuel (£25), an electric starter (£30), a battery for it (£15), a couple of spare glow plugs (£5 each), and cleaning products.
Buy spares. At a minimum you need main blades, tail blades, tail drive belt, main gear, and tail boom. These are the things that are most likely to get damaged in a crash. For the X400 or the 450X, the cheapest way to get a comprehensive set of spares is to buy another mechanics kit! You have a complete spare helicopter ready, and you can always build it up as another model for emergencies.
I hope this is of some use.
pca
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