Anyone Connect RC transmitter/receiver to a PC?

[Mark70]

My father is learning to fly RC planes.  I know he'd be interested in the freeware simulators out there.  Ideally it would be nice to send the signal from the transmitter/receiver to the PC.

I've read about hacking into the PPM in the radio which makes windows recognize it as two four axis controllers.

I've seen a couple of electronics  hacks which may or may not allow you to take the output from the receiver into a USB port.

Anyone know about this?

This seems like a community that might be interested in this.  I

The idea of building an RC sim cabinet for my local RC club had crossed my mind, as well as getting my dad set up to train on his PC.

[Mark70]

http://www.mftech.de/index_en.htm

some info.  have to read through to see if I can make sense of it.

[polaris]

im sure what you want exists if i understand you correctly
phoenix sim software

ive read about it on heli forums , have a look at the phoenix site , they must mention the hardware on there somewhere

[polaris]

they mention it under support, its a usb device you plug in to the transmitter and your pc, £80 for the software and usb device

[HaRuMaN]

Or you could get this.

I have one.

[Dazz]

Over the last summer I got back into flying RC again after a 15 year hiatus.  Instead of crashing a few planes, I purchased Realflight G3.5.  I found that it is nearly spot on with real RC aircraft.  I was able to get a model in G3.5 that I was going to use as my trainer aircraft in real life.  I practiced on the Sim for a while, while I was building my model.  Once completed and I took it out to fly I had no problem at all flying.  The flight characteristics were almost identical to real world flying.   

I tried many of the freeware sims out there like FSM, but none of them compared to Realflight.  I also looked into Phoenix, but I found it's flight model to be lacking.  I think this is just one of those things, "you get what you pay for".  I had my doubts when I purchased G3.5, but once I got it and was able to compare flying on my PC to flying RC in real life.  It saved several possible crashes and lots of wasted money in repairs or damaged equipment...  I cannot stress enough that a GOOD sim will help your flying....  I actually enjoyed using G3.5 so much that I went ahead and purchased G4 since I was getting into Hydrofoams and G4 had water flying.  No regrets....


BTW - I do have Realflight G3.5 in almost new condition that I am willing to sell.  It has everything including the USB controller.

[brock.sampson]

Depending on what kind of radio you have you can purchase one of these, or something similar. http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXJPC0&P=7.  I have this for my newer hitec radio and works really well with the free flight sim fms.