Copyright 2001, John Gossett, Austin Texas.
Knowing that my transmitter has both exponential and dual rates, I decided the next day (Sunday) to pull out the manual and see what those terms meant and if one of them would help make the terminator a little less skittish to turn. I determined that exponential was easy to set up and seemed to be the choice for reducing skittishness so I programmed transmitter for -25% exponential on both channels. I couldn't see any specific difference in the control actions, but since the controls wiggled correctly I figured it sure wouldn't hurt.
So at lunch Monday I decided to be brave and fly at the new soccer/softball complex they put in here at work earlier this year. A nice large area and I had flown my lite-stick here, so I figured I should be able to fly a HLG here, especially since I had read of posts where other folks had flown at soccer fields. I was just a tiny bit worried that I might fly into one of the many large light poles that surrounded the two fields. However, I figured that since I had managed to avoid pole encounters with the lite-stick, I should be able to avoid them wih my terminator.
So I gave her the usual quick check-toss, then set up the up-start and gave her a launch. She went up very nicely and I got a good launch (way above the light poles, much to my relief.) Several buzzards were circling nearby, so I had good hope of finding thermals, but first I wanted to check out the exponential controls. Man! Did that make a difference. I pulled some coring turns to check it out and I flew the terminator through some of the smoothest turns I had ever produced.
After a few of these practice turns, I started back for my approach. However, I forgot one valuable lesson from my golfing days - if you think, "don't hit it into the water," you most certainly will. I found that the RC glider correlary was thinking, "don't hit the light pole," with the result that I flew nose-first smack into a light pole that I was trying to fly behind. Unfortunately, that pole contact temporarily terminated my terminator. No damage to the wings or tail or graphite shaft, but the nose of my fiberglass fuse broke completely off from the hatch forward. I wonder if I can make a slip-on nose cone to replace the broken fuse nose. It took two ounces of lead in the nose to balance it anyway, so I figure a little fiberglass nose repair will just let me remove some lead! (Is that built in redundancy or what?)
Copyright 2001, John Gossett, Austin Texas.