I am so disappointed in myself.

And so is kitty...

In my fist build I recognized that the landing gear sit on their hardpoint rather high so that when retracted over half the width of the gear sticks out into the wind under the wing. In retrospect its not that bad, but for two years as I thought about this build I thought I should try to push them down into the wing by chiseling down the hard point. Seems easy, but I have neither the skill nor the tools. So one night I decided to take a hack at it. I ruined it.

I used a Dremel saw to cut a 3mm layer off the top of the hard point on both sides. It immediately became clear I was going to screw the whole thing up. Saw skips aside there is no way for me to measure nor control the depth.

Yikes this is shoddy work.

But the idea worked. The hard points however were no where near level nor equal.

So I dammed up the sides and poured some runny epoxy in thinking it my level out the irregular surface.

It created more problems... jeez, I was not going to spend all this time on the other wing, and I am sure they would come out lopsided. So I abandoned the idea before I made things irrepairable.

I sanded down the epoxy and glued in plywood to bring the hardpoints back to near as I could their original level.

I used epoxy to fill in the gaps and the saw over runs.

I sanded it all down to as level as I could.

And installed the gear and the plastic gear well. I like and prefer the well. I had wanted to leave a smallmlip all the way around the well, but I have never found a way to cleanly cut rhis plastic, so ended up without a lip. It works. So I have so far it seems escaped my stupidity. We will see if the landing gear are symmetric, and then I will call it a win.

RF8 Sim and Spektrum WS1000 Dongle

My Real Flight 8 (RF8) Horizon Hobby edition, and Spektrum WS1000 Dongle arrived the other day, and this morning I installed them. I purchased these as Phoenix RC Flight Sim has gone out of business and wil no longer be updated, and I have always wondered about the Real Flight sim. RF8 has been touted as the best RC Flight sim, and the Spektrum WS1000 Dongle allows wireless and effortless connection of any Spektrum transmitter for use with the RF8 sim.

I am rather disapointed.

They are both easy to install. The dongle has been criticized for having to push way hard on the bind switch on the end of the dongle while inserting the dongle into the USB port, but I had no such issues despite having done 3-4 binds. Install of the software was uneventful. I bound the dongle to my Spektrum DX7s at DSMX on the first try. I had created a new model using my default heli settings including 3-60 deg swash (Phoenix setup uses single servo swash), looking forward to using my own settings on my transmitter, but there is no guidance on what settings need to be on the transmiter.  I went through the Calibrate setup, and noticed that there was a lot of noisy signal crossover bwtween aileron and elevator, something I know is not happening on the transmitter (it flies Phoenix without this crossover noise). It also did not see most of the switches. Ok...

I explored the menus. I selected the default WS1000 Dongle as my controller. The setup us designed for 8 channels, but is supposed to work fine with less channels. The flight surfaces seemed fine and I took the default Timber 1.5M around. I noticed the the flaps are down. My flaps switch wasn't seen in Calibrate so no surprise its not doing anything. The Mix/Hold button on the transmitter causes the ailrons to deflect full right roll, I think flps down, and full throttle! Read the manual for clues, but still no idea how to get switches assigned when not seen by the software. Could not figure out how to get it to work right, so I just use the default U key for flaps. I also noticed the software put in a right roll on take off, but not in level flight, flies perfectly trimmed hands off. When I loop that crossover steps in and I have to roll left to keep the wings level. Yes, trims are zeroed. Annoying. Okay, lets try a heli. This thing is really a pain to fly helis in. The computer defaults to its own DR/Expo and throttle-pitch curves. Hold worked, but FMode freaked it out and it flips and crashes. So, one flight mode, touchy DR/Expo. I read how to disable the software Expo/DR and this made it manageable, but FMode still fails, and it seems to me its ignoring my DR/Expo settings. I tried several times to remap the switches, but its not happening. I played with settings, could not improve things. I bound my DX8 to the sim, and nothing changed. Several times it would not let me finish Calibration by keeping the Finish button gray, as I tried redoing that to make thw swithes and the roll thing stop. Went back to the DX7s on the defaults. Now Hold doesn't work and still one flight mode, even with using my transmitters settings. Everytime I calibrated it would give me a warning when I clikced finish, "You have calibrated only 6 of 8 axes, are ypu shpure you want to finish?" I have no idea... I moved everything Impossibly could, what two axes am I missing?

I went back to the Phoenix 5.5 and its model in my DX7s and it works fine. No crossover noise, all the switches work (all I was really looking for was Flaps), and my helis fly like real life with proper flight modes and Hold. 

To me the Phoenix is hands down the better flight sim.... I have a wireless dongle for Phoenix but it only has 4 channels, so I tend to use the PPM cable plugged into the trainer plug. This is what the RF8-WS1000 seems to offer, really onoy 4 channels; I must be doing something wrong. 

I expected more. I expected my Spektrum transmitters to work flawlessly with minimumfuss with the WS1000 Dongle and the sim. I expected not to have to make any fancy reassignments (turns out it won't let me reassign anything I need). Spektrum disappointed me with theire Alpha 6 stabikization system, and the complexity of programming the AS3X compared with far less costly Hobby King Orange stabilization systems. Now they have disappointed me with the RF8 Horizon Hobby addition and the Spektrum WS1000 Dongle. My Spektrum transmitters and the Spektrum WS1000 Dongle should work together out of the box, and RF8 should be able to play with Spektrum transmitters without fuss. Not much of an ask.

So I got no benefit out of $150 investment in RF8 and theSpektrum WS1000 dongle, over the now defunct Phoenix and its cable. I will try to find aircraft not included, I think I found an archive, and will call Horizon Hobby Customer Service to see if they can tweak my settings to get the DX7s to work properly.