Hey everyone!
I've been lurking here for a few weeks, I recently got a P4. I've been into every form of radio control since the early 80's and have flown glow planes, electric park fliers and even had a Kyosho Concept 30 glow helicopter back in the day. And of course radio control cars and boats.
This Phantom is so easy to fly it's crazy, hard to fly is a glow powered helicopter with NO gyros or stabilization at all, yeah that lasted for one flight before I went down to the hobby store and picked up a Futaba gyro. And even then it was only on the yaw axis (tail rotor), back then gyros had actual motors that spun up to speed, not the electric accelerometers like nowadays.
My first time messing around with aerial video was in 2004 strapping an Intel Play digital camera to a GWS slow stick, that video quality I think was 160x240, so bad you could barely make out features from 50 ft up, but it was so awesome!
For some reason it's taking me some time to trust the P4, I keep expecting it to just drop out of the sky for some reason, you have four motors - meaning four points of failure and no wings, if any one of them has a problem you are outta luck. You can glide with planes and at least try an auto-rotation with a helicopter.
I see all these videos on YouTube of (mostly) younger people taking these out of the box and flying them hundreds of feet in the air and miles away with no previous flight experience and it makes me cringe!
At any rate, lots of good info here and here's hoping these don't get regulated out of existence!
Cheers!
Stewart
I've been lurking here for a few weeks, I recently got a P4. I've been into every form of radio control since the early 80's and have flown glow planes, electric park fliers and even had a Kyosho Concept 30 glow helicopter back in the day. And of course radio control cars and boats.
This Phantom is so easy to fly it's crazy, hard to fly is a glow powered helicopter with NO gyros or stabilization at all, yeah that lasted for one flight before I went down to the hobby store and picked up a Futaba gyro. And even then it was only on the yaw axis (tail rotor), back then gyros had actual motors that spun up to speed, not the electric accelerometers like nowadays.
My first time messing around with aerial video was in 2004 strapping an Intel Play digital camera to a GWS slow stick, that video quality I think was 160x240, so bad you could barely make out features from 50 ft up, but it was so awesome!
For some reason it's taking me some time to trust the P4, I keep expecting it to just drop out of the sky for some reason, you have four motors - meaning four points of failure and no wings, if any one of them has a problem you are outta luck. You can glide with planes and at least try an auto-rotation with a helicopter.
I see all these videos on YouTube of (mostly) younger people taking these out of the box and flying them hundreds of feet in the air and miles away with no previous flight experience and it makes me cringe!
At any rate, lots of good info here and here's hoping these don't get regulated out of existence!
Cheers!
Stewart
