Off plane spotting!!!

Ah found it, after two hours of searching.

Should have had a . . .

Lost Model Finder!!!

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Our Design...

 

Have you ever wondered why things are made in a particular way or wondered why they did things in a certain way? Well we thought we would share with you our design physiology so you can se how we arrived at our final product.

 

Cheap. We wanted a product that could be fitted to every plane. We often take a selection of models to the flying field and having to move an expensive tracking device between planes becomes tedious and you can bet the time you forget will be the time you loose your plane.

 

Compatibility with all transmitter and receiver types. We don’t want our customer to worry about our LMF not functioning with different transmitters or receivers. It had to work with any receiver that had a standard servo connector.

 

PCM/2.4g Compatibility. We needed a design that would work with all transmitter modulation types and frequencies.

 

Suitable for any installation. We needed a model that would work without needing a spare receiver channel and indeed could work without a receiver at all for free flight models.

 

Ease of setup. Don’t you hate setting up a speed controller and how many times have you turned on a model and accidently gone into the setup mode? We needed a simple set up system.

 

Suitability for model planes. We needed it light but robust, it had to work on 4.8 or 6 Volts, should not interfere with the flight controls in any way, must have a low power consumption so an not to affect our days flying. When in alarm mode last sufficiently long enough for us to find the model.

 

So, that was our design criteria so how did we set about it?

We made many prototypes incorporating different ideas trying them out in model planes and also asking fellow modellers for their opinion.

Firstly everybody loved our idea of mode wires. This eliminated the ‘put throttle up, turn on tx, wait for 4 beeps…’ type setup. It also meant that the mode could not be altered accidently. Using switches was another option which we now use in our new model for 2009, the Mk3.

 

We had to balance the size/weight and current consumption against the volume of the sounder. We could use a ships’ fog horn but then our little fun fly would never get off the ground. We took the view that we know roughly where our plane goes down and can walk in that direction. We need a sounder that is clearly audible but do not need to hear it from one end of the field to the other. The ideal option here was to use a piezo sounder which is light, durable and has a high volume for its size.

 

The ‘old’ way of building a lost model alarm was to turn the transmitter off, the receiver would then stop sending pulses to the servos. This lack of pulses could then cause the alarm to sound. Modern pcm &2.4g receivers however continue to send pulses, even when the tx is turned off, a sort of a position hold, so a new way had to be developed which would work with all receivers. Thanks to the advances in electronics we were able to use an embedded microcontroller and very clever programming which monitors and validates these pulses. This also allowed us to make it suitable for a variety of installation types and led to the 3 modes and failsafe timeout alarm that you see today

 

Well, there you have it, this is how we arrived at the final product and if sales figures are anything to go by, model flyers love them. One modeller recently said to us “I bought one of those more expensive ones from your competitors as I thought it must be better. It wasn’t.” Sometimes we think that because something is more expensive it must be better. We can assure you, in the case of our lost model finder it is defiantly not. We keep our prices low so hopefully we sell more which fits with our ‘fit and forget for every plane’ physiology.

 

And Finally for complete piece of mind...

So confident are we that we have the best product on the market today we offer a full money back no quibble guarantee if you are not totally delighted with our products for what-ever reason. This applies even if you have used the product. We have to date never had a single unit returned.