| I currently fly Beast-X, V-bar and Skookum 720 on my helis. they all have their pros and cons. Beast-X is incredible value, flies great for the price and it's incredibly easy to setup. On the con side, it does not lend itself to as much fine tuning as a Skookum or a V-bar, and does not have governor support. Since the question was about Skookum and V-bar I won't go into much detail on the Beast-X, but just to say it can also fly amazing. V-bar and Sk-720 are very close in terms of how they fly. They both fly great out of the box. I've flown both units on my Logo 600 and on my 450 pro and I honestly could not tell you either one handled any better than the other. I did have an unexplained crash where the Logo 600 just decided to roll to the right and straight into the ground (probably due to high vibration levels) and this was while flying the V-bar. I don't know that this necessarily means the V-bar was at fault, and for all I know it would have done the same thing with the SK-720. I have since put the V-bar on my 450 just to make sure it was working right and haven't experienced any problems. The one thing the V-bar does noticeably better is governor/throttle control and options. By this I don't mean that the V-bar holds the head speed any better than the Skookum (they both do an amazing job as governors). The V-bar just gives you a lot more control in terms of settings, especially in terms of bailout settings and RPM selection. One of the coolest features in the newer pro softwares is keeping the engine running at very low rpm during autorotation mode, making it a very smooth and fast recovery on bailout. Also, the slow-start is better than the skookum (important if you are using some of the cheaper esc's with laughably hard soft-start like a hobbywing. Setting the RPM is also a lot easier since you can just set a percent on your radio while looking at the software to see what RPM that percent corresponds to. That means it's very easy to change your headspeed at the field by just tweaking your throttle curve up or down. With the Skookum you are forced to enter three different headspeeds, and then set your radio to three pre-determined settings. So if you want to tweak your headspeed a little faster or slower than any of the three settings you'll need to hook up to your computer and manually adjust it. On the other hand, what sets the Skookum apart is the logging support. The V-bar has very limited on-board memory and so only logs a few major events and warnings.The Skookum uses a micro-sd card so it has plenty of space to log everything. This is especially useful when it comes to vibration analysis. The v-bar vibration analysis can only be done in "live" mode. Which means for the most part you are limitted to doing vibration analysis while on the bench and hooked up to a computer (although you can use the incredibly over-priced bluetooth dongle to be able to access the live view while hovering). The V-bar will log vibration messages in its event logs outside of live mode but it is limitted to telling you that you had "High vibrations," or "Extreme vibrations," etc. The Skookum vibration analysis tool is amazing, and will help track down the exact source of the vibrations. While the V-bar in live view will show you a frequency analysis of vibration, it will simply output the combined amplitude of the vibration. With the Skookum, it will log each axis independently so you know if your vibrations are up-down, left-right, or fore-aft. You can keep vibration logging on during flight so you can look at the log after you fly and see what your vibration levels where during any point of the flight. When not analyzing vibrations, the Skookum can log all sorts of other cool stuff, like all your stick positions, head speed, voltages, and accelerations. You can see your stick positions, voltage, and acceleration in this little simulator-like tool that shows your heli in a 3d world. This doesn't really work as good as you'd wish, but it is really useful to see the stick movements you are making, especially when learning new moves or trying to figure out why you crashed. The V-bar has the advantage when it comes to bank-switching. This means you can have up to four different setups each with different gains, agility or aggressiveness settings and you can switch between them on your radio. The Skookum can do this too, but it treats settings for cyclic separate from tail settings and has two banks for cyclic and two banks for the tail. In practice, I have never really taken advantage of the 4 banks on the V-bar and I barely even switch between the two tail and two cyclic banks on the Skookum, except for when trying out new settings. In terms of setup/software I think they are comparable. The V-bar software looks nicer and feels more "modern". The radio setup is a bit weird and tedious, making you have to go into the radio and use sub-trim and travel to center everything. The Skookum just has you hold the sticks to the corner and calibrates accordingly. The Skookum software feels a little bit older and ugly, and it's a bit weird how they split the wizards into multiple ones, but it's pretty easy to follow if you start on the initial wizard and go sequentially to the end. One minor annoyance with the Skookum, is when making servo centering adjustments or setting your pitch range, they make you have to click "Send setup" before your change goes to the heli. The Vbar just mostly updates it live if you move a slider or enter a number and hit enter. One thing I liked better on the Skookum, is that you can do a large part of the setup without hooking up a battery to your heli. You only need to hook it up when you need to see the servo positions. This is actually very useful when you just want to quickly hook up your heli to tweak a parameter or view the log. The V-bar forces you to power the unit from a battery or it won't detect it. In practice, neither software was difficult to use, and it took about the same time to go from never having used the software, to having a fully-configured heli. The edge goes to the V-bar though for being a bit more friendly (especially having suggested values for different heli sizes when choosing cyclic and tail gains). In terms of tuning, I don't think there is a significant difference. Most everything that can be tuned on the Skookum can be tuned on the V-bar and vice-versa. All flybarless systems tend to come up with different names for things so it's sometimes difficult to figure out what the equivalent settings are. Both units have what I consider a "gimicky" features to an extent. The V-bar has Autotrim, which means you do a flight trying to keep the heli level with the least stick movement possible and it will determine the optimal swash plate trim settings. In practice I find under most correct setups trimming is often unnecessary, and it's easy to do the trim flight wrong and end up with worse trim than you started with. The Skookum's gimick is the "auto-level" feature. It works for some people, but for me it was finicky, and never quite worked right. It is very sensitive to vibration, and can quite easily get confused as to which direction is "level". I guess if it was reliable enough it could help out beginner pilots. I'm not sure how great it works as a stunt "bailout" kind of deal. Maybe if you are really high and you lose orientation and remember to hit it you might be able to give your self some room to regain your bearings. It won't really stop the heli from drifting and you still have to control the collective, so if you are doing 3d closer to the ground and dumb-thumb it and happen to remember to hit the bailout mode, you are likely still gonna hit the ground although you'll be more "level". If I'm forced to chose between V-bar and Skookum, I would say Skookum by a small margin. The vibration analysis and logging features tip the scales for me. It would have probably saved me a very expensive crash (I subsequently moved the Skookum to the Logo 600 which made it much easier to track down the vibration problem that I believe caused my crash). You really can't go wrong either way. My ideal would be a V-bar with Skookum-style logging, or a Skookum with v-bar style governor/auto-bailout options. |
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