In the summer of 1966 during the final days of my sojourn at St. Lawrence College, Mr. S. O. Speakman, my housemaster, summed me up for the very last time and handed to posterity his final words on this young and exuberant author, namely:

"He acheived an exceedingly good result in the first year Sixth Physics examination. He applied himself with great devotion and no mean skill to the construction of radio-controlled models for the helf-term exhibition. He has made some contribution to League cricket on the organizational side, and his work for social service has been real. He has kept a watchful eye on the billiard room, but as captain of the Knock, admittedly an appaling task, he has needed a great deal of prompting. So concludes quite a long career, and one whose usefulness lay considerably in the boarding aspect. His impulsiveness and periodic volubility go with a sensative and warm-hearted nature. Our relations have been good and I shall miss him. He has my best wishes."

Which is an admirable summation and hits the mark with fearful accuracy! Although no longer young, this author has managed to survive through some alarming times and terrifying adventures, and being still able to think and stand upright, he returns to one of the loves of his early life as this little narrative proclaims.

This story details the beginning of my adventures in radio control, other locations on this web site will, or may, detail the further adventures as they unravel. Here however, for the nonce, is the beginning of it all.

I am returning to R/C after a hiatus of over thirty years. Marriage, moving from the UK to the US in search of high-tech computer work - and finding it - and loving it! Children, college and re-modelling old houses have all combined to keep me away from this hobby I loved so much. Coupled with a first wife who thought such sport ridiculous it is only now that I can return to it freely. Still encumbered with kids in college however - perhaps suffering as I did and note in this document - and with both a new car and a new mortgage, the budget is not exactly flowing with options, but today, July 18, 2001, I bought my first plane kit, a Great Planes Pete-N-Poke, so it seems appropriate that now is the time to recall those early years of anguish and mirth.

I remember being given my pocket money of a Saturday and immediately riding my bike to a local toy store to buy a new model plane. These cost nine-pence, about seven and a quarter cents in those days if my arithmetic and recollection of the exchange rate is correct. These would be about a twelve inch wingspan balsa and tissue rubber powered model. There were models of everything from free flight duration to instant-death scale, I have always preferred this latter. There would be two or three sheets of balsa with parts printed on them, no die-cutting in those days. A bunch of longerons, a propeller with rubber, a canopy, some wire and wheels. The plans and tissue were also included. Invariably the dope would cause the most terrible warping of the wings and one often ended up with wings that looked like a canard but were in fact supposed to be dead straight. But nothing could stop me building them and one a week was about right, a few days to build, a few to cover and dry, one to decorate and a couple to destroy, for none ever lasted long, but they were great fun.

This was the mid to late 1950's and it was during this period my father was also whetting my appetite for more lethal fare by flying control-line pulse jet. If anything could be imagined that would cause noise-abatement groups to froth at the lips and call the army then these planes had to be it! Forget noise limitations, these planes would cause the shut-down of any airfield, the noise was phenomenal, but just as exciting as all heck! In fact, speed and noise was about all the excitement that could really be expected from these aircraft; they flew in circles at fearful speeds scaring wildlife for a radius of about five miles, they drank prodigious quantities of gasoline, and that was about it! Totally unwieldy in the air but, as I said, great fun.

Sometime around 1960 I acquired an ED-Bee, 1 cc, about .06 cubic inches I guess. One could always tell an American engine as it was measured in cubic inches, in the UK we always used cubic centimeters and even today I find the latter more meaningful. He rode a 650 cc Matchless motorbike, sounds so much better than 40 ci! More manly somehow. My ED-Bee was, as was the custom, a diesel, and I just loved it. I was given a Cox Pee-wee as a present about this time but it was not the thing at all, far too small and, sniff! A glow plug. Real men flew diesels...

This engine travelled from plane to plane to plane. Many free flight aircraft by Veron and Kiel-Kraft, and although I remember a Kiel-Kraft Pirate that flew dramatically for an entire afternoon, wiping itself eventually out on overhead power lines, it was a Veron control-line that really got me going, I spent an entire summer flying this thing round and round and round, repairing and patching it until the original was almost completely hidden behind glue, scrap balsa and tissue. It could only perform the most rudimentary loops but I did not care, it flew, and I loved it. All I remember was that it was solid balsa and I painted it green.

I was introduced to Radio Control in a desultory way around this time and despite the lack of drama, I knew this was something I wanted to do. The introduction was via my Uncle Nicholas who invited us all to a picnic at the Ford Aerodrome, a disused airfield in West Sussex. He had a Veron Skylane with single channel radio. Alas, despite the best attempts and finger blisters on all our hands, we never got the engine to start, so I never saw it work. Nor did it ever, I do not know why but my uncle decided that enough was enough, stamp collecting perhaps was more the thing, and I got the radio.

Bliss!

Around this time I was packed off to boarding school where life was even more idyllic for the intrepid modeler. Do the homework, study, and build and fly. As icing on the cake I joined the air force as a cadet and learnt how to fly the real thing. I put in many, many hours in Chipmunks learning every aerobatic in the book, some heavy bombers, a few MacDonald Douglas bomb trainers, but those Chipmunks were just great.

Initially I was still building free flight rubber and control-line as my little ED-Bee was no way capable of driving anything large enough to carry my radio, this little engine got some good time in control-line flying wings though and I was becoming extremely proficient at this type of flying. But then along came a young lad who had no radio but, lo, someone had given him an engine, a - hmmm - glow engine it was but it was big, like - waaay big, and beggars cannot be choosers - THIS would drive a radio control plane and no mistake.

We found a plane as I recall that had been build, crashed and dumped. We repaired it, installed a rubber powered escapement and the radio and checked it out. This was a major task, this took time, courage and patience, but what did we have if not plenty of both?

First, the receiver used a valve. It had a high voltage battery, I think 12 volts, to drive the filament. This in turn heated the anode which gave off electrons which were directed via the grid to the cathode. Another battery of much lower voltage powered the grid and cathode and thus by varying the voltage on the grid you got a much greater voltage at the cathode, thus it amplified the pathetic signal it picked up from the transmitter into a slightly less pathetic signal to drive the escapement. Oh the things you learn in model airplaning.

What is now referred to as a servo was then called an escapement. Power was from a long old rubber band - which was a vast collection of rubber bands swiped from the classrooms, much cheaper than the rubber loops required from the hobby shop and getting to the hobby shop was an issue, we were in boarding school, got released for a few hours on rare occasions and no web! At the end of the rubber band was attached a wheel with four short pins on it and one great big one. Around one side of the wheel were two levers that contact the short pins and stopped the wheel from turning. When a signal was applied at a solenoid located close to the perimeter of the wheel and that controlled the levers, one lever would retract and the other extend, thus the wheel would snap with immense energy through ninety degrees. When the power was removed from the solenoid the first lever would extend and the other retract sending the wheel clacking through another ninety degrees. As we wanted the rubber band to provide energy for a looong time, it was wound very tight and the furious clacking of the wheel would make the entire airframe groan and shudder.

Due to the frequent and sudden massive jerks the fuselage received from the escapement and the staggering vibration the whole underwent from our dubious propeller, the receiver was mounted using four rubber bands, one at each corner, the other ends of which were attached to convenient points in the fuselage. Thus the receiver could twang up and down but was relatively immune from vibration. Regrettably it probably suffered greatly from acceleration and deceleration but on the whole it held up.

Thus when the little valve picks up a signal, it amplifies it and send the result to the solenoid, the wheel would thunder through ninety degrees, the long pin attached to the wheel would drive a stick which was attached at the other end to the rudder and lo! Left rudder. A very violent left rudder. Dropping the signal would drop the power to the solenoid and again, Clack! Neutral rudder. Another push of the transmitter button and you got right rudder, then neutral and so on.

And it worked.

Well, it worked on the ground anyway. The transmitter was this vast great steel box with an antenna of very impressive length on the top, a switch and a button and that was it. It carried two great square batteries inside it. It also had little pots to twiddle to fine-tune it. We never changed those batteries they were so vast, for all I know they are still installed and still functioning.

The receiver had the valve and associated circuitry, a heavy battery for the high tension power, a slightly less heavy battery for the low tension, a lot of heavy rubber bands, a heavy old solenoid and the escapement.

Range testing consisted of one person carrying the model using a set of pre-arranged hand signals to the person holding the transmitter. This latter sat on the ground with the back of the transmitter removed and a screwdriver to adjust the pots. The person carrying the plane walked further and further away until almost invisible, furious gestulating to impart the information that things were working or not. If it seemed that they did not - for it was not always clear whether the arm wavings were indicating success or failure, the person with the transmitter would twiddle the pot until the frantic gestulations of his colleague indicated proper function - perhaps. This would be then repeated with the plane carrier walking TOWARD the pot-twiddler for, as the radio worked for longer and longer distances, so it would cease to work for the shorter ones. Likewise when the plane was working closer to the transmitter, so it ceased to do so far away. Typically, in retrospect, we ended up with the tuning we had at the start, we accomplished nothing! It was a problem that was never really solved. It was not until many years later that I realized that we had been using a metal screwdriver to adjust the pots, and that using a metal device so close to the transmitter circuitry would affect the gain to such an extend that the hours we spent tuning were effectively pointless.

It never really mattered either for the radio never really worked. We THINK it might have, the plane flew tolerably well. We THINK when we pressed the button it turned left, or perhaps right, one could never really be sure, but it made a grand noise and it flew quite well and we were sure it worked as planned and we were pilots. real R/C pilots. Due to lack of funds the fuel tank was extremely small which was good as the plane never got far away, we never lost it, but then we were never really sure if we were in command of it or not. Occasionally when it landed we would find that the little glass valve was rolling around in the fuselage, batteries would come adrift and sometimes we would find the receiver flapping around when one of its rubber bands broke, yet we were sure we were in firm command, most of the time anyway.

But this airplane lasted a good little while and I do not remember what happened to it. I do know we removed the engine and the radio for the grandest of experiments, for we had read an article on the ultimate control system, a system that was just too cool for words and we decided we had to have it, Proportional Single Channel Radio Control, and so we set out on an adventure I laugh about even today.

Proportional Single Channel support required surprisingly little effort to implement, mostly transmitter modifications as I recall. Instead of a power on/off switch and a transmit button on the front of the transmitter it was modified to replace the transmit button with a rotary dial. The transmitter circuitry was then changed so that, instead of a single signal transmitted as long as the button was held down, a constant stream of pulses was transmitted.

The circuitry transmitted around ten pulses a second and each pulse was divided into two parts, an ON part and an OFF part. The sum of the period of the on and off parts was constant, around one tenth of a second, the duration of the on and off parts however varied in proportion to the dial on the face of the transmitter. When the dial was all the way to the left, the on part of the pulse was almost zero, if not actually zero and so the off part of the pulse occupied the entire period. As the dial was rotated to the right, so the on part became longer and the off part correspondingly shorter until, when turned all the way to the right, the on part of the pulse occupied almost the entire duration and the off part was virtually eliminated.

We realized that the rubber band escapement would not serve for this implementation as it would soon run out of rubber power so we employed a push-pull control for the rudder. This was driven by an electric motor and a rubber band. The rubber band would pull the rudder to the left and the motor would try and haul it over to the right. Depending on the power provided to the motor it would succeed entirely when full power was supplied, or not at all when no power was present. As power slowly was increased, so the rudder would slowly - proportionally - move from left to right. Great skill was required to determine how many rubber bands to swipe from the class rooms to balance the motor power, but with time and patience this was accomplished tolerably well. Regrettably the electric motor would require yet a THIRD battery, but in the interests of science this did not phase us.

What we did need was a new aircraft. The old one was too beaten up and, if memory serves, we had acquired a new and more powerful engine. Family members do occasionally come through at anniversaries. As the cost of a kit was prohibitive we decided that, with all our experience, we could design a plane from the ground up. It would be maneuverable but stable, strong and light, low wing load and pretty. So we drew up plans for a fifty inch or so wingspan high-wing craft with ample wing area. We built it using plenty of plywood and we covered it in silk, although where on earth we got that from I still wonder. We painted it blue and gold and it was a treat to behold.

We carefully installed the receiver, push rod, batteries and electric motor into the fuselage, anchored everything properly with anti-vibration rubber bands, screws and the appropriate methods, checked it all out and turned on the transmitter. We had no idea if the transmitter was transmitting of course, no LEDs in those days and no lamp or anything on the box, but the dial twisted freely and we were sure we could feel the energy waves leaping from the impressive antenna to the receiver wire. We turned on the receiver.

This was frightening! The rudder commenced the most terrifying clacking and shivering, the electric motor wheezed and groaned as it fought against the rubber band and hauled the rudder to a position somewhere between left and right. The fuselage twittered and vibrated, slowly leaping toward the edge of the table. And this was with the engine still unmounted.

But it worked. It was absolutely amazing, with hardly any effort we had single channel proportional. As we turned the dial on the transmitter, so the rudder would flap and shake its way across its range proportionally to the position of the transmitter dial. It was dramatic and VERY impressive. The noise was considerable and the draft caused by the rudder quivering back and forth would clearly aid in propulsion. There was some thought given to the fact that this rapidly flapping rudder would cause a rapidly flapping aircraft in flight, we thought this might be unsightly, sort of unprofessional, but the rudder displacement was only a degree or two, perhaps four, and it was rapid and would tend to cancel out, we thought, perhaps. Either way, we had a go!

We mounted the engine, fuel, tubing and, hoping the batteries would last, headed one afternoon up to the cricket fields for a maiden flight. We climbed over the fence on one side of the field into a field of barley, I think it was barley, and did some gliding tests. It worked okay. As I recall the barley was rather high and we were rather short but we saw that it floated along fairly well, sort of. So we climbed back over the fence to our school field and prepared for the great event.

Perhaps at this point one might offer a few words of advice:

1) Do match the engine to the airplane, our new machine was vastly overpowered.

2) Do ensure that surface drivers, the servos, have adequate power to actually move flight surfaces against the force of the air once airborne.

3) Do use adequate rubber bands if the wing is so mounted.

4) Do ensure that wing incidence angles are set properly, it helps to have a qualified designer define these.

5) Do ensure the balance point is correct, the qualified designer who helped in 4) above no doubt would be useful here too.

We did a range check, carefully, and it seemed to work well enough. We were anxious not to spend too much time doing this as the battery consumption on board the airplane was something fearsome. We turned it off, fueled up, fired up the engine, set it running at full power, turned on the receiver, a quick check to ensure it was working and nodding and grinning above the staggering racket of engine and flapping rudder we launched our creation into the wind.

It never really flew, not really in the accepted sense of the word.

It soared, vertically, straight up. Furious twiddling of the dial produced absolutely no result whatsoever, the plane just went straight up, vertically, diminishing in sound and size as it soared ever onward, ever upward, ever smaller. We twiddled like crazy, this way and that way but nothing, not a twitch, not the slightest indication of any effect whatsoever. Of course the plane was by now a dot anyway, we could not tell if the radio was having any effect, sometimes it would not work close up but would function very well far away, we twiddled and hoped.

Then we realized that the dot was no longer one dot but two, and one of the dots was getting larger and noisier. The other dot was happily twisting and flipping like a high-flying butterfly, but we had no time for this dot, it was the noisy dot, no longer a dot, that was causing us very much concern. Still twiddling the dial, a subconscious reaction by now, the screaming howling banshee of a fuselage, under full power, came shrieking down toward us at the most fearful speed and, carefully looking around for a good landing spot, it chose to end its life in the middle of the first-eleven cricket pitch, not unlike a five hundred pound bomb, and silence descended. We just stood there, aghast... Horrified beyond measure. They send you into therapy for such events these days.

Now a few words about cricket pitches. In England, cricket is considered the only true game that a gentleman should play, and we were all gentlemen of breeding naturally. Cricket is not unlike baseball, instead of a diamond with four sort of pads at each corner, cricket is played on a strip of ground one chain in length. As I am sure it is common knowledge a chain is four rods long, or one hundred links. In modern parlance that would be 66 feet give or take a few inches and it is about a yard or two wide, maybe a little more, so the actual pitch is relatively small, but it is placed in the middle of a vast great field where the ball may be hit and hopefully recovered, the game proper however is played only on the pitch.

In baseball you have a member from the enemy team attempting to whack a ball with a hopelessly inadequate tool, the ball is hurled at this poor individual by the hurler and the idea is to knock the ball as far away as possible and while members of the other team try to get it back, the hitter runs all around the diamond stopping at each pad where he is safe if the ball is recovered. If the ball is recovered while he is between pads, he is termed OUT and must return to the shed with his head hung low.

In cricket it is very similar. Instead of pads there are wickets, two, one at each end. A wicket consists of three bits of wood stuck vertically into the ground with little bits of wood balanced on the top called bails. The wickets are twenty yards apart in the pitch which as you recall is a chain in length. There are hitters equipped with slightly more reasonable hitting devices in that they are flat instead of round. One hitter stands in front of each wicket. A ball hurler stands at one end of the pitch and, taking a mighty run, hurls the ball at the hitter, or batsman, at the other end. Just like baseball the idea is to hit the ball as far away as possible. While the ball is furiously being recovered by the other team, the batsmen run back and forth between the wickets passing each other in the middle, exchanging comments such as, "Jolly good hit," "Spiffing" and "Gadzooks." And similar to baseball, if the ball hits the wicket while the batsman is somewhere between the two wickets, and the bails fall off, then the batsman heading in that direction is termed OUT and must return to the shed, head hung low. Just like baseball, the winning team is the one which has run the most number of times back and forth between the wickets, well, sort of like baseball.

The two games are surprisingly similar really, except perhaps in the US they do not say "gadzooks," maybe, I am not sure about this. They chew things though and spit a lot, perhaps they should drink more tea.

The schools in England were very fond of cricket and had many teams and not a few pitches to play on. The very best team was the FIRST team, the second best was the second and so on. As there are eleven players to a team there is the first-eleven cricket team, the second-eleven, the third-eleven and so down the ranks to the hopelessly inept who, for want of any better identification are placed in "The League!". Now, the grass on this FIRST-eleven cricket pitch is extremely precious, it is maintained by a team of specialists who ensure that it is the very best of grass, nothing is permitted to grow in this small area, no weed would dare show its head lest it is instantly ripped asunder by the fanatics who tend this plot. The pitch is perfectly flat, smooth and the grass is kept very short and is trimmed with nail scissors at every opportunity. It is fed and watered religiously and offerings are made to it on special holidays. The pitch is surrounded by guard-rails to keep foul people such as R/C enthusiasts away when not in use. Actually, R/C enthusiasts are encouraged to stay away even when it is in use, a rule I can tell you from personal experience we were only too happy to accommodate.

Thus we were dismayed in the extreme when our creation chose this prime piece of hallowed ground to bury itself in. It made a very nice imitation of Vesuvius toward one end of the pitch, just in front of the wicket. Splendid chunks of grass were hurled this was and that, mud was turned up and worms blinked in the sun and there were bits of glass - our valve having finally given out - and wire and tubing and balsa and paper and batteries, even the batteries broke, just everywhere. We ducked under the rail and scooped up everything we could find, then grabbing our fuel bottle and transmitter we just ran.

The engine was broken, the crankshaft jammed through the back of the crank case. The only thing that could be reused was the rubber bands, everything else was lost, gone, done. The wing, for all I know, is fluttering in the upper atmosphere still, we never recovered it. Ironically, although a few souls must have seen us return with the shattered remains of our dream plane, and although there must have been much furor over the damaged cricket pitch, no connection was ever made to our plane accident. Of course it was a common sight to see us return from the upper fields with bunches of loose tissue and wood in our hands, we made little impact on the daily running of the school. I can only presume we managed to leave no incriminating evidence behind, or what we did leave behind caused no suspicion in the minds of the groundskeepers, I incline to this latter belief for there is no way we could have salvaged everything, groundskeepers have no experience of model airplanes so make no connection. They probably put it down to a local rabid dog who had been chewing on a balsa tree covered in silk. Actually it is unlikely that a grounds keeper would recognize silk anyway.

I remember working on a hovercraft after this and building a new receiver. The hovercraft never hovered properly, one corner or another always dragged along the ground but it did whizz in circles at great speed, we never got to the point of putting radio into it.

I built a Keil-Kraft Marquis control-line stunt plane around this time which I flew on a number of occasions very successfully. This was a beautiful plane and I was quite adept at making it fly in the most fearful manner. Then I started work on quick-blip single channel control.

I built a boat for the first implementation of quick-blip. Into this I placed a purchased servo called a Kinematic, and I have all of it still! Like the rubber band escapement this device had a great big wheel that would spin around whenever it received a signal, only instead of a quarter turn each signal it would spin around a full half turn, thus for each signal it would turn a half turn when the signal was applied and stop, then when the signal was dropped it would continue on around to complete the full turn. This wheel was powered by an electric motor and it took a few tenths of a second to complete each half turn.

The secret of quick-blip was if you dropped the signal BEFORE it finished the first half of the turn, that is to say, not having turned a full half circle, it would return to its point of origin, driven by a spring, and as it turned in REVERSE it engaged a ratchet located underneath and made an electrical contact. Repeating the quick-blip would cause the ratchet to be engaged yet again and the contact to be broken. So by combining longer signals with shorter, one could control two surfaces, or devices, or something. A reduction wheel on this big wheel allowed me to control the rudder, left, then neutral, then right, then neutral, just liked the rubber powered escapement. The quick-blip drove the engine, electric in this case, and so I had full power ahead, neutral, full power astern, neutral and so on. Very cool! This worked very well indeed and I spent many happy hours chasing ducks on the local pond, Mewsbrooks as it was called. One design flaw was the rudder. If I went into reverse and then applied the rudder in one direction or the other, it did not matter which, the force of the water would hold the rudder tight in the direction it was pointing, as a result nothing would work anymore. So a number of times I had to sit and wait while the boat went round and round backwards. Eventually it would come to the shore, or some nice gent and his lady in a row boat would rescue it for me.

I was still using the original batteries in the transmitter.

And so I left school and went to college, radio control gave way to pubs, engines were replaced by girls and life changed. My very last flight was about 1969 when I was at home on a vacation. I pulled out my lovely Marquis and took it down to the local village field to fly it. I used to use a tail anchor with a string release so I could fly on my own, and surrounded by a group of awestruck local kids I fired it up and proceeded to perform some awesome aerobatics. I suppose the glue had given up the ghost or something but the fuselage suddenly whizzed down the symmetrical wing and stuck at the far end, held in place by the bell crank wires. Still flying horizontally at great speed and with zero control, the fuselage then broke free and magically missing the kids, it shot through the air like a rocket, still under full power, and ploughed into a bush and the wing came fluttering down.

One of the kids belted after the fuselage and engine and came back full of delight and wonder. How easy it would be to fix it he told me, it could be done in a jiffy and I could fly it again in a few minutes, he loved this plane and what an engine, he could fix it if I liked, it would take but a few minutes, should he? What did I think, should I like him to do that?

Well, I was going back to college and, then, I was getting too old for this maybe, and this youngster was so impressed and delighted by everything that I gave him my Marquis, engine, cables, fuel and the lot. He was so excited he could hardly speak. And I walked home alone and have never flown a plane since.

I wonder if he remembers me and what he did with my lovely Marquis.

Thirty-two years have passed since that day; a move to Italy for four or five years, then a move to California, a marriage, a daughter, a number of houses, a divorce, a major move from California to Maryland and a second marriage. And despite the new marriage, a new mortgage, a new car and the new children, I am now the father of five, of which three are still in college, there is, on occasion, a little cash left over. And so, after thirty-two years, we have a Pete-N-Poke winging its way to us via the US Postal Service.

All I need now is an engine, four stroke, oh yes - who could resist a four stroke. I need a radio system which I will NOT build, I will buy this one, this time. Then, let us see, I need some of that remarkable Monokote, an iron and a hot air blowing device. Glue, I need lots of glue, they use CA now, hmmm, some knives, that plan-protector stuff looks good, what else I wonder. Yes, I shall be flying again soon... I cannot wait.

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