freestyle Veteran Location: Redmond WA USA
| I've spent a lot of time tweaking the sim's roll rate and pirouette rate so they match my real heli. It's kind of tedious because I've never used a stopwatch to time my rolls or anyhing - I just adjust the sim by feel - but I like the results.
The sim's gyro is more predictable than reality. If you find that you hardly ever use the rudder in the sim, turn down the simulator's gyro gain, or tail rotor size, or something like that. The tail will slip out a little now and then, like it does in real life, which will force you to learn to work the rudder. If you have a 601, this may be less of an issue.
I also think that most of the default simulator setups (and the ones I've downloaded) are way overpowered. Set the pitch range to something like +/-9 degrees, and turn down the engine power until you can hear the engine struggling just a little bit at full collective. I think I'm running my G2 setup with something like 40% engine power (but I haven't looked at the numbers recently).
Besides practicing maneuvers on the sim, practice saves. Try to do maneuvers way beyond your skill level, just for the experience of being out of control for a moment. Then, regain control. Fight with it all the way to the ground if that's what it takes. Eventually you'll get better and better at saving it. Then you'll be much less likely to panic if you get surprised in real life. Some friends who trained wth Tod Bennet said this was one of his exercises for them (he takes the heli way upstairs with the buddy box, then does something weird and asks you to get it under control). It gave them more confidence to try new stuff. I used to try to do death spirals and rolling tailslides with the CSM 8.3 simulator - there was no heading hold mode in those days, so I always got into an new and unexpected orientation that way.
I made a web page about simulators once...
http://www.natew.com/rcheli/frames.cgi/html.Simulator
Ignore the stuff I wrote about RFD, a lot has changed since then (it's no longer called RFD, for starters!), |