My 550SX the Soybean farmer

[mkovalcson]

Today my 550SX did a tail slide into a field of waist high soybeans.

The heli was a bit too far away and I was flying tail down and turning and I lost orientation close to the ground. ( blades in vs. blades out ) I thought I knew which way it was facing and I was wrong.

So the heli went down about a football field away from me and disappeared from sight.

My Jeti DS-16 told me that it had lost signal ( this was actually a good thing because the soybean field had strong attenuation of the signal )

So I ran down the runway and up the tractor road to a point a lot closer to where it went down.

My DS-16 registered a blip and I got A1: 3 A2: 4 and I started to triangulate using the dual antenna in my TX. A1 = Antenna 1 and A2 = Antenna 2 since the DS-16 has redundant antenna with separate strength readings up to 9.

So I would wave the TX back and forth and get 3,4 4,4 4,3 and I would head in the direction 4,4 then I would get 4,5 and move until I had 5,5 and so on until I finally reached 9,9 At that point I was about 8 feet away from it.

The good news is that the heli was nearly undamaged. I had to clean a lot of soybean off of it, but only had one nylon landing gear bolt break and the tail jammed in a bit.

So I adjusted the tail and belt tension, and pressed one of the landing gear bolts back into place and spun it up and hovered it for about 10 seconds with 3 landing gear bolts in place but decided not to push my luck any more and packed in up and brought it home. I'll replace all of the nylon bolts since they've been stressed.

Up until that point I was flying up a storm(relatively speaking of course). I had spent half an hour on the AccuRC simulator before I went to the airfield practicing some new stuff and I was doing it all at the airfield comfortably. Great Day!!!!

BTW that AccuRC simulator really is a very noticeable improvement over Phoenix 5 and Real Flight 7. I've got all three on my new high powered dedicated sim box connected to my large HD TV and running wirelessly. When going from RF to AccuRC it wasn't as noticeable but after flying AccuRC for a while and then going back to Real Flight or Phoenix, just yuk and then going to the airfield it felt REALLY close.

[Frostwick]

After seeing this thread > https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=647063

Are you worried about invisible cracks in your blade grips?

[Dsss]

I doubt they were undetectable. I you pull the blade grips apart with your hand it should expose something like that.

Thats pretty awesome to be able to have detailed signal strength ,just paid for itself!
Mark you are going to have me order radix blades and this accu sim too...

[mkovalcson]

Originally Posted by Dsss

I doubt they were undetectable. I you pull the blade grips apart with your hand it should expose something like that.

Thats pretty awesome to be able to have detailed signal strength ,just paid for itself!
Mark you are going to have me order radix blades and this accu sim too...

AccuRC is pretty cool. Very few helis, only 3 airfields, no training, no online flying, but it has one heck of a great physics engine. Once they fill it in it will be amazing. You also need a pretty powerful computer with a good video card for it to work well. I built a dedicated box for it, so the trickle down for me once I could see how it worked on my workstation was a bit.

So it is very good, but it isn't as simple as just install and run. It takes time to setup and configure it too.

[Dsss]

Setup and configure the heli components? Or tuning?
I am assuming the updates will be free d/load?

I am interested to see what better physics ,graphics are. It seems that with today's tech much more is possible.

[mkovalcson]

Originally Posted by Dsss

Setup and configure the heli components? Or tuning?
I am assuming the updates will be free d/load?

I am interested to see what better physics ,graphics are. It seems that with today's tech much more is possible.

Updates are free. So if you expect to eventually get it, it doesn't hurt to get it now.

There are actually some pretty well configured helis on the AccuRC on the model swap thread. So you can save time by downloading some of those.

https://www.helifreak.com/showthread.php?t=638320