I had planned on having a review of the MA Stratus 90 in this issue, however the review machine is sitting upstairs half built waiting on the rest of it's parts, hopefully that'll be ready to go for the next issue. Instead, I've got a bit of a story on the JR Vibe 50 with pictures taken just yesterday. It looks like a great little machine, and if JR don't screw up and price it (and it's parts) out of the market (as they are prone to do) then it will be a hot seller. It does have a lot of competition though with the T-Rex 600 taking off and MA's new Razor just coming onto the market, but can any of them really take the crown from the legendary Raptor 50 which still represents perhaps the best value for money going?

Apparently JR have invented a new gyro that actually works, I've heard this a lot in the past and generally treat statements like that in the same way as you treat news that peace has broken out in the Middle East. It might work this week, but what about next? In the past JR's gyros have in general, been crap. Everything else that JR have done is good, but their gyros, no. Apparently though, the JR 770 REALLY DOES WORK and to prove it, one of it's supporters is sending me one to play with, so we'll see.

Hasn't spread spectrum really taken off now? For the past few weekends, it hasn't been at all uncommon to see many more spectrum users than 'normal' users at the field which has been great, once Futaba and JR are fully up to speed with releasing their full range of spectrum products then it's going to be on for young and old. What a major development for the hobby! No more frequency clashes, ofcourse the usual precautions of range testing, preventing lockouts etc still apply.

After thousands upon thousands of flights, the old Vigor is currently stripped down and getting rebuilt, a lot of the parts that are being replaced were just plain worn out so they're being replaced by Vibe bits, even after all these years, the old beast still flies as good as anything on the market that I've flown!

F3C World Championships Poland
Congratulations to Hiroki Itou for winning the F3C World Championships (again!). It sounds like Poland were great hosts with great organisation. It also sounds like a number of weaknesses were highlighted in the much vaunted F3C scoring system so we'll have to see what comes of that.

3D Masters 2007
Congratulations to Dominik Haegele (Masters), JaeHong Lee (Expert) and Markus Kreuzberger (Clubman) for winning their respective classes at the 2007 3D Masters event. 3D Masters seems to be going from strength to strength which is great for the hobby. Australia's own Gavin Broadbent did extremely well and came second in Expert, well done Gavin!

Things I've played with lately:
MA Spectra G
I flew a Spectra G last weekend and was very impressed. Pretty good power for a gasser which I'd rate at a bit more than the power of an OS 70, but with much more torque. It would sit and do side ways tic tocs all day and still have the same monotone "brrrrr" from the engine. If you were in the market for a gasser, you'd be hard pressed to go past this one.

Quick Gasser
This thing is the absolute inverse of the Spectra, it's terribly built thing with parts that aren't machined properly (the owner had to do a lot of work to get the parts to fit properly), the CCPM geometry means for a very small amount of pitch value in the swash settings you get a huge amount of actual pitch movement, shockingly slack dampening (boom strike material) and no matter what I did, I couldn't stop it from getting a suicidally savage oscilation that just about cost it it's life. A terrible machine that was even worse than the Quick 50 that I flew in 2003 and that thing was bad too. Steer clear of it.

Avant EFX
A couple of months ago I flew an Avant EFX, it was the first time I'd come across an Avant and I was impressed with how it flew. Very impressed. It rolled extremely straight and true, was very responsive to collective pitch and felt very 'light' as in you didn't have to 'haul' it around the sky, it just flew. This one had too big of a flybar on it which made it a bit squirrely around center, but apart from that, was ideal. It will be interesting to see what the Aurora is like when/if it gets here.

MA Razor 50
Last weekend I set up and test flew two Razor 50's. It's an interesting little machine, it's more like a 3DMP than any MA machine I've ever seen and it's extremely quiet. However it seemed very down on power and any attempts to lean it (and another one there) were met with overheating problems. At first I put it down to a dud engine, however we swapped the engine out to a well known YS that had come out of a T-Rex 600 and had similar underwhelming results. I'm not overly convinced that the heli is at fault but the second machine was brand spanking new with a YS 50 in it and seemed well down on power as well, so the jury is still out on that machine. I'm hoping it was just an abberation, I can't see anything fundamentally wrong with the Razor and it certainly flies very well indeed, but something is soaking up power there somewhere.

Plagiarism of Littlerotors content
One day I was did a little test to see if I could find other sites that were copying my content without either permission or credit and to my surprise found 7 of them who had word for word copy and pasted my content and were trying to pass it off as their own. One was even a large hobby store here in Australia!

In just about all cases when contacted the sites responsible made good and either removed the content or credited the content as my own with a link back to the site.

I don't mind if my content is used in Club Newsletters or other websites as long as I'm contacted about it and credit is given (ie don't pass it off as your own) because after all, creating the content in a site like this is hard work!

Pilot Locator
The Pilot Locator has continued to grow in popularity since the last newsletter with it still rating second most popular section of littlerotors.com. Make sure your details are up-to-date! The pilot locator can be found at www.littlerotors.com/findapilot/

Market
The Buy/Sell Market has been growing also. It should be noted that this section will accept postings from all over the world, not just New Zealand. List your items free of charge! See the market at www.littlerotors.com/market/

Articles this issue are:

JR Vibe 50 First Impressions
Finally, JR have released a 50 size helicopter worth buying! The little Vibe shares a lot in common with it's bigger brother as well as some intelligent design ideas influenced from other machines. Will it threaten the newly released T-Rex 600 and MA Razor or even the legendary Raptor 50? Click here

Futaba 12FG
Futaba have released yet another new 12 channel radio, this one is meant to fill the market gap below the 12Z, it represents awesome value for money and with the upcoming release of integrated spread spectrum, should be a hot seller. Click here

OS 91 PS SZ
After thousands of flights in the Vigor, it became time to replace the old OS 91 C-Spec, after being burned by the piece of crap OS 91 Perry Pump PS, I was a bit wary of trying the new SZ, although now, I'm glad I did. Click here

Feel free to contact me at simon@littlerotors.com at any time.

Si