I went out with my flying buddy and friend Ollie tonight to a real open field and was able to fly the Thunder Tiger Mini-Titan with all the upgrades.  The Scorpion -8 motor, the new speed controller, the metal / aluminum control arms, and the green paddles.

The first flight was just getting used to things for the most part, the helicopter really sings and sounds smooth with this motor and gearing setup.  It’s quite a bit more touchy with the green paddles, and will take some getting used to.

On the second flight I went for flips and rolls and was simply amazed at the difference in the performance of the helicopter, the flips and rolls were great, relatively.  The last time I tried to flip this heli, it was more like a loop that ended up in a bush.  I was pretty comfortable flipping my Raptor 50, and my Raptor 60 (70) so I doubt it was pilot error.  I held off at first because I was afraid it would be a similar experience, but it was not anything like that, it was AWESOME.

I tend not to use exponential or dual rates when flying, I’ve personally found it an added confusion to have it flying in multiple different ways. Someone once said that mankind’s biggest downfalls is the failure to understand exponentials.  While I understand exponentials reasonably well in many things, I don’t adjust for them well.

Setting exponential in an RC radio is a way to make the sticks less responsive in the center, and more responsive the further away you get for center. For the most part this allows you to have your controls less re-active in the middle, making it easier to control the plane or helicopter with small adjustments in the middle.  The response is non-linear, which means the further you push the stick out in any direction(which has exponential enabled) the more responsive the control gets.  1/4″ of stick travel around the middle may only move the servo arm 1 or 2mm, but if you move it past 1/4″ the servo arm starts to EXPONENTIALLY respond, and an additional 1/4″ may move the servo arm 4-6mm, etc.

While I feel ‘expo’ is beneficial for most, in my non-linear mind it just screws me up, so I leave it out.

Dual rates serves a similar purpose.  When you have the DR switch on a ‘low’ setting, servo travel is limited across the entire movement of the control stick in a linear way.  When you are in high dual rate settings, the controls will move the servo more, across the entire stick range, resulting in more responsive controls for stunts or other thing.

Even ‘old’ radios have pretty high resolution for the stick movement that if you do not enable dual rates or exponential, you can train your brain to move the sticks slightly for fine control, and more extensively for those high-g adrenaline pumping maneuvers.

It all comes down to a personal preference.  I dislike non-linearity in my controls and I also do not like it when my helicopter responds differently depending on the position of a switch I may or may not forget to throw before a stunt move.  Currently the only switch I use is the idle up switch, and I’m sure someone will come up with a way to get rid of that eventually.   One of my great crashes (check The Carnage section) was due to forgetting to switch into idle-up.

If you’re interested more in my upgrades, check the related posts down below.

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