toy remote control airplanes
How to Choose an RC Helicopter
Executive summary of article by William Redants
Even if you are familiar with RC fixed wing craft (airplanes) you will soon see that flying an RC helicopter is a whole new ball game.
That being said, apart from the power source, method of starting the engine etc, RC helicopters are all pretty much alike in terms of how they fly. And they fly pretty much the way a full-size helicopter does. How easy they are to fly, depends on how the rotors operate.
A helicopter lifts off the ground by rotary motion. To avoid this happening another rotor must be introduced, spinning in the opposite direction. If you now apply the throttle, the helicopter will lift off the ground in a straight line.
RC helicopters are controlled by means of a transmitter, which sends signals to the receiver, which then transmits them to various electronic servos and, in hobby-grade models, a gyro (on the tail end) Hobby-grade is anything that is not a 2 channel toy. Toys are for little kids. RC helicopters can be one of two types – single rotor or co-axial. Single rotor craft are further divided into fixed-pitch (FP) or collective-pitch (CP) helicopters. Pitch relates to the way the main rotor is controlled. On fixed pitch craft, the rotor cannot be angled in any way, and lift is achieved by throttle alone. On CPs, lift is achieved by a combination of pitch control and throttle.
The fixed pitch RC helicopter normally has a 4 channel receiver; the CP 5 (more commonly, 6.) This makes collective pitch helicopters incredibly manoeuvrable – but totally unsuited to beginners. Well, keeping to a basic 4 channel fixed-pitch model, first there’s the throttle. For that, you need fore-and-aft and side-to-side cyclic controls.
Hopefully, you will see by now that even piloting a simple fixed-pitch radio control helicopter is a tricky thing to master. To hover, you have to co-ordinate the two rotor blades.
