Decided it was time to buy a new rc plane, and chose the Atomrc Swordfish. I'm instantly very impressed, so far its been nothing but awesome!! Wanna throw me a few dolla to help me keep making videos? www.buymeacoffee.com/gizfpv
I prefer the Swordfish over the Dolphin even though a twin has an additional point of failure. I think the important thing is that the Dolphin is made for pilots who want their heart rate raised, whereas the Swordfish is made for those of us who want it lowered.
I guess a twin could be seen as an additional point of failure, but its also an additional redundancy if you know how to set it up properly in something like arduplane, and using a seperate channel per motor. Lose a motor and it can still fly on the other, assuming youve got enough authority from the rear stab/rudder ?
A very enjoyable video and most helpful in my builds. I now have two Swordfishes thanks to your recommendation and guidance and they are an absolute blast to fly. It is a lovely aircraft. The only improvement suggestion for AtomRC is to go with BL32 ESCs (or whatever we will now use now that BLHeli is going away). Happy flying, Giz!
I came in to write a positive comment to a hobby colleague. Well, what can I say. great flight and picture, I envy that you can launch a plane, we still have a ban on launching drones)
I also use the same 3000 mAh GNB batteries in my T-1 and usually get up to 40-45 minutes at absolute best. The Swordfish seems to have a more aerodynamic shape, maybe that's why it's so efficient.
I bought the T1 Ranger as my 1st plane. I managed to tear it up some trying to fly it without FPV and without a flight controller. So I bought the VTOL flight controller and hooked up a Caddx Vista to it, but then got really busy at work and it's been sitting on the shelf for a few weeks now. I can't wait to get it back out. I was trying to decide between the T1 Ranger and this Swordfish plane as my first. I think the Swordfish will be my second after I make sure I can fly the plane alright.
You need a panning servo, watch the Pirates video mate.....lol.. You should be able to stay up with no motor if the wind is coming off the sea...Smooth moving carpet of lift, best there is because the sea is flat...🤔😏😏😳🇬🇧
I am considering a panning servo. Only problem for me is my radio (Tango 2) doesn't have sliders, so would need to engineer a creative solution for controlling the servo
@@gizfpv Oh, you bought a Tango?...see me after School ....Well, you could use the Rudder stick on a switch, so flip the switch for camera Panning, back again for Rudder control maybe ..🤔😳😏😏🇬🇧
My phone case actually has a wind filter for the mic built in, but annoyingly I find it makes the audio worse. Typically have to take the case off to record audio segments for my videos 🤦
Awesome flying, dude! 😃 Really nice airplane indeed! What is it running? iNav? I don't remember from the reviews how was its internal space for FCs and so on... Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Yeah it's running Inav, although Atomrc will let you download a pre-configured Ardupilot file from their website if you prefer. I might try it at some point just to get a bit more Ardu experience :)
i was literally about to buy this and then i seen this old warbird a t28 trojan 1.2 pnp for 25% off, so in aud it was 560 and went down to 420, i was looking at buying the swordfish in rth version for 390, so i ended up buying the trojan because with a fc and everything i needed it was about 550 but still saved $140, and i can always get the swordfish for 390 so i pulled the trigger on the warbird lol i already have fpv gear for it so yeah its going to be dual camera one in the cockpit one under the plane both on servos so i can pan around. i havent had a plane with landing gear before so im excited and also really afraid LOL!
@@gizfpvalmost a year later and I bought a sailplane, started looking for an FPV plane and found my old comment. Looking at this, the Dolphin and the new Zohd Altus but I can’t decide what to get.
One of the odd things about this product is the specs. Atom rc Recommended prop - 7045 Atom rc provided prop - 7042 I plan using both to see how they do. I suspect the 7042 are more efficient.
I'd not heard of that before so just looked it up. Very......interesting looking aircraft. Massive tail, but very small wings? Lol. I'll make a point to watch some videos on it later
@@gizfpv I got some clips from flying it.. Baseline it is pretty wobbly with these small wings. Andrew Newton made a mod for it, extended the wings by 125mm each, I did the 3d printed wingtips extension based on his idea and now the plane makes sense. Pretty efficient too.
the poor glide performance is down to the props windmilling in the wind, Connect the FC to BLHeli and you can change the ESC's to have a brake function. this then in turn makes it glide much much better. I speak from experience in doing this :)
I flew my HEEWING T-1 again and I dropped to 30% throttle (on 3s) and it dropped into a nose dive lmfao. I throttled up to 70% and was able to regain control but yeah I think this plane has a huge advantage over the T-1 minus portability
The poor gliding with the power off is due to propellor drag. If the propellors could fold back out of the airstream it should improve greatly. Beautiful countryside you have to fly over.
Yeh AtomRC planes are really fab! Had Dolphin, but unfortunatly it didn't survive :( Great plane but requires much higher starting speed what makes it a bit harder to launch and landing speed is over 50km/h so it is a bit harder to smoothl land. Swordfish because of twin-tractor the launch is so smooth, you just release it and it goes... landing (especially if you set up flaperons) also super smooth! At the moment it is my favorite plane! and defiantly recommended as starting plane for newbies, I'm not even talking about efficiency and flight time and how big battery its capable of caring
Great and informative flight. My preferred position for camera location would be on the canopy with a pan servo so can look around a bit. Would mostly minimize nose in view, but allow for great motor and wing views. The canopy position might raise some concerns for how secure the camera/canopy attaches, but a 3d-printed latch could solve. (check out Eclipson Airplane canopy latch designs for some creative inspiration .. in assembly videos) Regarding your glide test (8:51), wondering if you had the ESC brake set, as windmilling props can be very draggy. ESC brakes also have soft and hard braking, so likely want hard braking. Ideally combined with folding propeller, for glider style setup. Noticing props appear to be turning different RPM (4:50), so wondering if have differenctial throttle (yaw mix), or it might be related to lighting angle? Having flown the Volantex Ranger a bunch last year (pre-T1 Ranger), it would be interesting to hear your thoughts between the two in future, after have the Swordfish tuned in.
Yeah I'm gonna do some experimentation with camera positions. Certainly keen to see how things look with the camera positioned on the canopy. The latching mechanism on the Swordfish actually seems fairly robust so I don't think the canopy would be likely to fall off, but yeah I'll look into ways to reinforce it if needs be. As for the gliding and ESC brake, I absolutely agree, and this is the number 1 reason why I mentioned wanting to fix the brake. I need to go back and look at the settings. Hopefully it's just something I've missed. That's a interesting point about the motor RPM's. I'd also noticed the 2 motors sometimes seemed to spin at different rates, but hadn't thought much of it. I'll have a look at the Inav settings shortly, maybe you're right, maybe Atomrc have done some fancy yaw mixing. Very cool if they have. As for the Volantrex Ranger, it's a great aircraft.....when it's flying. Problem for me is the damm wing retention clips keep breaking and it's a major hassle to repair them. As a result my Ranger has been in storage 8 months now and in all honesty I don't know what my future plans are for it
@@gizfpv Sorry to hear you're having ongoing issue with the V-Rangers wing retention clips. :( That would be frustrating. Otherwise, it seems like a good model.
Sorry for late reply. The stock FC is a Atomrc branded one (that's basically a clone of the Matek F405 wing). By default the FC comes with INAV preinstalled, but you can download a pre-configured ardupilot file from the atomrc website if you prefer :)
Annoyingly my phone doesn't have a headphone jack, otherwise that would have been a ideal solution! Glad you managed to comment on the right video in the end btw :p
Thank you, what a nice plane. I fly drones but think of trying out a plane in the near future. It might be a silly queation, but will the plane be able to fly on one motor? Regards, Gert from The Netherlands.
You should try out a plane. I used to fly drones, but once I tried a plane I was hooked lol. Yes the plane would be able to fly with 1 motor, although it would constantly want to yaw to one side which would require rudder action to compensate
I want to buy a model for long pleasant flights. I wanted a hee wing t1, but I watched a video about swordfish and now I don't know what to buy. which aircraft do you prefer? reliability, maintainability, the impression of long flights.
I am wondering why the Ampere on many streams with the same setup and flightspeed is so different .. a few report ~ 4 Amp but many videos shows ~ 8 Amp. (4S cruising speed ~ 50 km/h in normal weather conditions)
I have the dolphin as my first plane and it's really awesome. It's good at everything. It's efficient, good for LR, but also great for high speed and freestyle and crazy manouvers. It's stable even in slight wind. It's not too big or heavy. Every other plane I've considered does at least some of these worse. The only, huge, disadvantage is that I just can't figure out how to launch it consistently. It's good that I can easily glue it back together (unlike the ranger), but it's already in a pretty bad shape. When you test the max flight time on the ranger, do you fly faster than the swordfish? Because I'm not really trying for max range or time and I still got over 41km in 41mins on a 3s4200 (4s3000 would be like 3s4000). I cruised for half that flight and flew light freestyle for the rest. I'm pretty sure I could push it to 50min if I cruised for the entire flight or more if I also slowed down. I have the old version of escs/motors/props so that might also play a role. I'm not sure if esc break will work. They have a 2004 (edit: never mind, it's bigger, but still) motor with 7" props. Ranger also can't always stop the props. Why do you want this feature? I turned it on, because I have a pan servo and it's cool to look at it, but the prop would have less resistence if you allow it to spin.
Thanks for the great video. I am planning to purchase the Atomrc Swordfish RTH+FPV model as my first plane, what else is needed? Googles, What else? Thanks in advance.
Not really sure what you mean? Yeah I was using a li-ion battery. I did slightly over discharge it at the end of the flight (min voltage is 10v but I took it down to 9) but thankfully it bounced back up after the aircraft was disarmed
I fly RC aircraft at a club field. I slso fly drone. However, I have not flown FPV with goggles. Is there a way to fly this without goggles? How can one keep track of the aircraft? Is there a way to see it on map?
You can fly without goggles yes. You could fly it line of sight (LOS) like traditional RC aircraft, or if you wanted to fly FPV but didn't want to use goggles for some reason, you could fly using a screen instead. As for your second question, yes there are ways to see the aircrafts real time position on a map. That's no so easy to do however, and depends on what control link you're using
The 'trip distance' for this flight was 43km, so you could probably do a 20km flight and back quite comfortably. The battery used was a 3000mah 4s Li-ion battery. Average speed at cruise is around 35-50kmh. Top speed that I've managed to achieve with this aircraft so far is 130kmh
No it doesn't, you'll need to buy a transmitter and also a receiver separately. There's loads of options available, but the most popular choice is Radiomaster
Having the ESC brake enabled would forcibly stop the propellers from spinning when the motors are at 0% throttle. This is very useful when trying to glide (stationary props produce less drag) and when landing, as props are less likely to get broken
