[NSRCA-discussion] website back up

[Jon Lowe]

Hey, I'm not NEARLY as old as RVP, but I flew with escapements, galloping ghost, reeds, Super regen receivers, etc. We flew one at a time because super regen receivers weren't selective enough.  Newbies in this hobby have no clue how good and reliable the equipment is today compared with the crap, but then state-of-the-art equipment we flew with back then.  I remember my Dad retuning his single channel tube receiver before every flight.  I remember him tuning the reeds in his receivers.   I remember chasing fly away airplanes when one of a million things went wrong, often because the flier forgot to rewind his escapement rubber band.  I remember an article by Phil Kraft when he said that digital proportional systems would never cost less than $1000, and those were mid-60's dollars.  I remember watching a guy with an early Space Control analog proportional system chase servo drift with temperature change throughout the day; he never did fly because things drifted so much he finally ran out of adjustments.  I remember my Dad buying boxes of AA carbon-zinc batteries and soldering them together for receiver packs because sealed nicads didn't exist.  I remember when a low pattern entry at the Wright Brothers Memorial Contest in Dayton was less than 100 pilots, and we flew pattern, pylon and scale all on the same weekend.  Heck, I remember when radios were expensive and engines were cheap; how that has changed! I built a 4 channel digital proportional system called the Digi-quad, and I made my own transmitter printed circuit board from scratch.


It is stunning to me that we can buy a $60 computer radio system out of China, put aftermarket firmware on it, and do anything that the so called state of the art radios can do.  Micro $2 servos that work!  $10-15 2.4ghz receivers!


Jon



-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Richards <bob at toprudder.com>
To: General pattern discussion <nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org>
Sent: Sun, Dec 5, 2010 9:01 am
Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] website back up




Yeah, right, whatever. :-)
 
Ok, "At least I did not fly with a radio that required winding up the servos".
 
Bob R.

--- On Sat, 12/4/10, Ron Van Putte <vanputte at cox.net> wrote:



Hey!  We didn't have to "wind up the radio".  We had to wind up the escapement rubber band.  Big difference!

Ron VP

On Dec 4, 2010, at 10:09 AM, Bob Richards wrote:

> Showing my age? Yeah, I wrote Fortran programs in school - on punch cards. My first personal computer was a TRS80 MIII that I paid $1000 for, 16k memory and cassette tape program storage. I worked on point-of-sale systems ("POS" - LOL) that had 32k core memory. I still have a cash register board somewhere with core memory on it.
> 
> Well, at least I never flew a plane with a radio that required winding up the radio. :-)
> 
> Bob R.
> 
> --- On Sat, 12/4/10, Bob Kane <getterflash at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> You are showing your age.  You could see the "bits".
> 
> Bob Kane
> getterflash at yahoo.com
> 
> --- On Fri, 12/3/10, Bob Richards <bob at toprudder.com> wrote:
> 
> Core memory, I bet!
> 
> 
> 
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