Saitek Pro Flight Trim Wheel

[roger-wilco-66]

Hi,

I bought the Saitek Trim Wheel (Cessna Edition) and what can I say, it's one of those "why didn't I get this sooner" things. Before that, I mapped the elevator trim to the unused throttle wheel on the CH combat stick (I have a Saitek throttle quadrant for throttle / prop / mixture). It worked, but was way too coarse for fine elevator trim settings. Now I'm extremely pleased and a step closer to real world flying. I hooked it up via FSUIPC4 to my P3D installation.
Next change will be the stick. I want to rework my old Suncom Talon F-15 Stick with hall sensors and pair it with one of Leo Bodnar's DAC USB units which I have lying around for a year now. Way to go!

Cheers,
Mark

[MarkH]

Seconded on the trim wheel. Never thought I'd be recommending a Saitek product ;)

[modelr]

Another second on the Saitek Trim Wheel. Works a charm! Only thing I dislike is having to recenter it for each aircraft, whenever a reload is done, or a restart. It does not remember "center." If you don't have a visual trim gauge, you must do a lot of hurried adjusting during take-off and climb out until center is located. Once it is found, this is great, as it works exactly like the one in the Cessna 152 our local club used to own. Love it. Makes some "twitchy" aircraft easily trimable.

[fliger747]

This works by biasing the sensed position of the stick center? Each increment of FSX trim is set in the .Air file and could be changed there to make for a finer set of steps if the range were sufficient, but I can see where an analogue bias might be more variable. The old CH sticks used to have a trim wheel which merely tugged on a rubber band to bias against the springs to reset the center. There was a center mark for the trim for reset to zero bias.

Cheers. Tom

[roger-wilco-66]

This works by biasing the sensed position of the stick center? Each increment of FSX trim is set in the .Air file and could be changed there to make for a finer set of steps if the range were sufficient, but I can see where an analogue bias might be more variable. The old CH sticks used to have a trim wheel which merely tugged on a rubber band to bias against the springs to reset the center. There was a center mark for the trim for reset to zero bias.

Cheers. Tom

I have an old CH Combat stick and found the mechanical trim to be unusable, because it never really centered back on the zero position and even small increments produced too large of an elevator change to use it as a decent elevator trim control. I opened the stick and unhooked the mechanical mess for good after fiddling a while. The rest of the stick is good, that's why I still have it.

I'm happy as a puppy with the Saitek trim wheel now! Recentering can be done with the FSUIPC control. Part of the pre-flight procedure now. In the airicraft I fly I have a visual control, too.


Cheers,
Mark