Flying radio control helicopters is a worldwide phenomenon and with the UK FIA team jetting off to the US in a few weeks time to do battle at the World Championships, there can be no better time to take at peek at what’s happening in the world of RC helicopters across the pond.

Most of this info was gleaned from the pages of Runryder (http://runryder.com), which is the place to go for all news relating to remote control helicopters in the USA and Canada. At first glance it is very in your face – crowded out with banners and club ads - but this simply reflects the US attitude towards RC helicopters in general.

In America, flying RC helicopters isn’t a hobby – it’s a cult religion. The good news is, it’s a very friendly cult to belong to.

Just as in the UK, clubs revolve around their social events – it’s just that there’s a lot more of them and everyone is invited. From micro electric helicopters to Turbo Giant 950 RCs - the Runryder pages are crammed with fly-ins and ‘friendlies’ from Arkansas to Wyoming. Serious competitions are scattered throughout, but they’re never allowed to get in the way of the fun.

Let’s see what we have for the coming month…

Well, on May Day we can head across the border for the Western Canadian kick-off event at Saskatoon - otherwise known as SHAG 09. So far, so British. But in Kennett Missouri there’s a boot heel heli funfly on the 2nd, with particular emphasis on the fish fry supper and barbecue.

May 9th sees the Cini Heli Smackdown, which sounds like a good ‘ol boys knees-up, until you discover that it is, in fact, a rather sedate “heli clinic” in Cincinnati.

May 15th is “all about helis … and having FUN” in Havelock, MD. This is a family fun weekend, using RC helicopters in ways you never thought possible. Like the Chew - Whistle - Limbo – Land event, which involves chewing a peanut butter cracker, giving a whistle and limbo-pole flying … among other things.

And that’s just the first fortnight.

I’d like to say the US is just the same as the UK when it comes to electric helicopters, but I’d be wrong. The best advice I can give is if you’re flying to the States this year, take your whirly bird along – you’ll be made welcome.

Flying RC helicopters is a great hobby – but to take it to its ultimate, there’s nothing quite like building a helicopter from scratch. Whilst it is true to say electric helicopters dominate the RTF (ready to fly) market, more and more flyers are building from kits.

You might say, “Oh no, that’s not for me – I’m way not good enough to think about building my own.” But the chances are, if you’ve been flying RTF electric helicopters for any length of time, you’ve already started!

There are two grades of RC helicopter; toy and hobby grade. A toy helicopter is generally very basic with just 2 channels. If it gets broken, you chuck it in the bin. With hobby grade helicopters, you can replace the broken part with a new one.

Many beginners crash their first helis quite early on, wailing in despair as they watch sixty or seventy quid’s worth of birthday present pin-wheeling across the tarmac. Then they breathe a sigh of relief as they realise all they have to do is Google up the place they bought it from and order a few new parts.

But the parts don’t have to be broken. Many buyers of RTF electric helicopters start basic, and then install upgrades to make their choppers look or fly better. This can be anything from changing the fuselage (as with the carbon fibre upgrade kit for the E-Sky Belt) to upgrading from a brushed to a brushless motor (as with the E-Flite upgrade kit).

So here’s an exercise for you. Go to the “upgrades” and “accessories” departments of this store, choose your favourite helicopter from the list, and take a good look at what’s in front of you.

What you’re looking at, is basically an RTF in kit form.

Once you’ve been flying a while, you might want to think about combining two hobbies into one, and strapping a digital camera to your helicopter. Yes, it is possible! Go to YouTube, and you’ll be able to see all sorts of RC helicopters playing “Spy-in-the-Sky.”

Some of these craft will be quite a lot bigger than yours, but with digital cameras – both still and video – getting smaller all the time, there’s no reason why electric helicopters can’t do the same job professional RC film crews do with their gas-powered gyro monsters.

The cheapest way to get started is to mount a conventional wireless camera with video hook-up to the underneath of your heli. Suppliers of RC helicopters sell mounting brackets, or gimbals, for all size craft including mini-micro.

However, it’s important to make sure the weight does not exceed that of your bird, or you’ll never get airborne! Since the smaller things get, the more expensive they tend to be, why not play safe and buy one specially made for the job? They can be used in other places besides your under-carriage, have reasonable stills and video quality (like any camera, this will depend on the number of pixels installed, but 5.0 is about average) and they come with full hook-up so you can watch the show from the ground as it’s happening.

What you’ll be buying is a “Spy Cam” pinhole, and they retail from around £25 upwards, with another £25 for the mount.

You can buy “combo” kits of RC helicopters. These combine the chopper, camera and mount in a single box. We’ll be going there next…

When you choose your first RC helicopter it will be equipped with a radio transmitter. This will probably be a conventional 72MHz or 35MHz PPM/PCM. However, if you are lucky it might be one of the new 2.4GHz spread spectrum models.

Without going into too much detail, conventional RC electric helicopters operate at a single frequency on a set bandwidth. They might be PPM (Pulse position modulated) or PCM (Pulse Code Modulated, which is slightly better) but it still equates to interference between helicopters flying on the same frequency in groups, and interference from practically anything when flying alone. It’s the reason peg boards are used at group meets.

Recently, a new technology was developed, called spread spectrum modulation. Unlike the PCM/PPM system, in which each of the RC helicopters has its own, single frequency, spread spectrum RCs transmit over a large range of channels within the 2.4GHz bandwidth, simultaneously.

This sounds like a confusing mess. It might be confusing, but it isn’t a mess. As well as making crystals and peg-boards a thing of the past, it also eliminates most of the interference caused by non-RC sources such as mobile phones.

But how does it work? Well, when SSM radio control helicopters are built, each transmitter is assigned its own unique code, which is programmed into the receiver. The two lock on to each other when the transmitter is first turned on and from then on the receiver will only respond to the specific set of frequencies being sent by the RC.

Because there are so many frequencies available on the 2.4GHz bandwidth, every RC will have its own unique “set”, encoded on the receiver. It’s unlikely anyone else will be operating at exactly these same frequencies and, even if they were, the chances of you standing next to them would be minute. Each receiver is uniquely encoded anyway, making this point irrelevant.

The upside of all this, is that many spread spectrum RCs can be used together without interference either from each other, or from other radio sources. Because each RC is constantly scanning across the 2.4GHz bandwidth randomly, it means several RC helicopters can fly in tight formation with no chance of frequency interaction.

Another plus, is that the sending and processing of 2.4GHz radio commands are much, much faster. All of which can only be good for the future of RC electric helicopters.