Race report Saturday March 8th – Ten Raters

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Race Report from Saturday

Four of us raced on the North Course in the SE’ly breeze of 8 to 10 Knots with pulses of a little more.

The northern course was ideal as there was a gaggle of 29ers having a training weekend and an FF Open. We were joined by Nigel testing the latest version of Craig’s Proteus.

We managed 10 races before departing home for the Rugby, least said best mended!

It was very pleasant in the sunshine, though the conditions were top end for lightweight sails. The lions share of the races went to myself, though pressed closely at times by Richard and Phil, indeed Phil managed 3 wins with his recently fitted new sails.

Richard had problems with his counter weight and had to retire from the last race, but did manage 3 second places to Graham’s one.

Hugh 9 pts with 7 wins
Phil 15 pts with 3 wins
Richard 24 pts
Graham 26 pts

HM

FR Sky Transmitters…!!

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I managed to get my hands on one of these a couple of days ago. From the airplane and gliding world, the FrSky Tandem X20….. Bit of a wow. It was interesting to see what they use over in flying.

They cost about double (450GBPs) what radio sailors would think of as “pricey”, but can you tell the difference?

Amazingly – a resounding “yes”…. the feel was a huge step up from what we are used to. The body was a lot more solid (alloy maybe) and interestingly weighed about 900g so a bit heavier than common radio sailing transmitters. It felt very good in my size/shape hands. The “Apple” of transmitters maybe.

Gimballs (“Hall gimbals”) very smooth and more central on the console which somehow gave a nice balance (nearer centre of gravity perhaps) while you used it. Thinking about it more, if you move the screen to the top of the unit (most of our transmitters have the screen at the bottom), you can then move the gimbals down lower on the console itself.

Another thing I noticed was that the gimbals can be rotated slightly for those in search of more comfort over longer periods. Somehow, the whole thing looked more showerproof too. Really tightly fitted together.

When we decided to write the radio sailing manual for Radiomaster transmitters, I came across FrSky because the previous range FrSky along with Radiomaster use the same OpenTX software. FrSky seem to have abandoned that OpenTX strategy now as it was holding them back. They have done their own modern looking operating software called EthOS. That’s amazing too – it’s like having a full iPhone aboard, …all icons, colour and sexiness. Lots of preloaded configurations for power mixing and the like.

I might have misunderstood, but the owner said you could send updates (like custom model configurations) to it “over the air”…. so he can swap configurations with friends very easily.

The owner of the unit that I tried was a Competition Gliding fan. I asked what he used previously, and interestingly he had a Spektrum DX6E – which of course is very common in sailing.

Way over-configured for the needs of radiosailing, but it was interesting to see what £450 would buy you.