Page 22 - MFW June 2025

little money and simply customs issues had eased slightly but you still needed to
by massaging a few know how to go about the process and of course the
computer keys, such is customs people took enormous delight in not telling
life. anyone this did add to both cost & frustration.

C h a n g i n g o f t h e Our very first shipment of engines duly arrived & were
guard customs cleared followed by the expected excitement, a
The exact dates elude marketing strategy was then formulated and an
me but probably up advertisement in the national modelling press, we sold
until the early 1990’s all quite a few Irvine’s particularly to the Quickie crowd a
our R/C equipment had number of issues quickly surfaced Ron Irvine had
been AM or amplitude designed a very good powerful motor but sadly their
modulated and along quality control was shocking or perhaps they sent the
with most others in my dodgy ones to the colonies, thankfully before too long a
circle I now possessed deeper pocketed north island distributor took over the
a stable of AM Rx’s and agency and presumably the warranty claims as well.
was fairly proficient at With AWA moving away from R/C supply the Futaba
b u i l d i n g t r o u b l e range was taken over by another distributor who insisted
shooting and tuning on a shop front and with the failure to supply such
these. stopped supply, by this time we had come to the
conclusion that being a model supplier of any sort with too
In more crowded skies difficulties had been experienced many partners wasn’t going to ever make us either rich or
with lack of space for more frequencies to in turn allow famous, because I was either the youngest or possible
more modellers flying at any one time AM by its very most gullible of the group it was my task to annually face
nature required greater elbow room between frequencies our honorary auditor with the books and I well remember
to ensure there was no interference between channels, his often voiced opinion that we certainly weren’t in
the great change taking over the R/C world was now FM danger of frightening any of the large corporations of the
or frequency Modulation and because it used a narrower day any time soon.
band to supply information was touted as allowing us a
greater number of channels within the same space, Life moved on, because we no longer had the same
greater security closer bandwidth more channels etc. access to Futaba that we had once enjoyed other
and is the transmission process used today, however as avenues will explored and largely at our groups
with anything new there were teething problems and instigation the deep south became a pretty much JR
sadly the change did mean that a significant proportion of domain, with the advent of removable modules I
my test & setup brews no longer served their purpose, equipped my entire Tx fleet with JR plugin modules and in
fortunately my precious Oscilloscope and its companion the main on 72MHz which of course meant that I seldom
frequency counter were still relevant, my first sortie into had frequency clash worries, obviously at the time it
this new technology was once again magazine driven wasn’t strictly to the letter of the law but I strongly doubt
RCM&E published a series on a complete system over a there were not others doing the same , I this was not
series of months & as usual I was in boots & all and while widely advertised and I feel reasonably confident that no
the build was no great bother and everything worked well damage was inflicted at any time.
there were a number of alarming reports of unexplained
glitches and generally unhappy behaviour reported in the Recent modellers possibly don’t even understand the
modelling press, thankfully in the deep south and issue that apart from pilot error frequency clashes were
possibly most of New Zealand we were somewhat possibly one of the leading causes of model destruction
isolated and had no major problems however there was prior to the advent of 2.4GHZ systems, up until that time a
obviously issues that were not fully understood, in time frequency board and some care was required to ensure
these would all be sorted but not without lots of clever you did not switch on while someone on the same
people applying themselves, the input of lots of American frequency was in the air, a backward glance will quickly
tax payer dollars via the space industry and of course the establish that we have come a long way in a relatively
little people breaking models. short space of time in that regard.

About this time I obtained my first Computer what a magic Some years past I became interested in electric flight and
box, giant learning curve on word processing, spread attempted to run a larger than life tomboy on a geared
sheets and Databases, still no internet but good things do buggy brushed motor working on the assumption that
take time as the cheese advert stresses. more wing meant more ability to carry the crushing weight
of batteries, whilst this was successful to the point of
Now that our group was firmly in the southern Futaba actually flying the performance left so much to be desired
business there was enthusiasm for expansion and given that the project was parked up and left for further
that one of our group was a “Pom” we tended to look to the development, the advent of the latest Sanyo R/C 2000
UK for inspiration, why not import some Irvine engines, sub C cells reactivated my enthusiasm to the point of
this was duly done with some difficulty and by a lucky purchasing a Kyosho T33 ducted fan jet along with a pack
coincidence I knew a Customs agent who was willing to of the Sanyo cells yes it did stagger round the sky very
go through the clearing process for us, by this time briefly after a very athletic launch but sadly not really
21