#538 – Missle Man with Bruce Simson

Dave Jones: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, released April 12th, 2021. Episode 538, Missileman with Bruce Simpson. Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, and I'm Bruce Simpson from XJet and RC Model Reviews on YouTube.

Dave Jones: Hey, Bruce. First time we've actually caught up. Thank you for coming on. You're a much-requested guest, so tell us about your background and what your channel's all about and all that sort of stuff.

Bruce Simpson: Well, it started a long time ago. I was born at a very early age. I was just a baby at the time. I think I'll skip ahead a bit, though. Yeah, I've got two YouTube channels like yourself. I've been doing this full-time for quite a while now, and it's paying the bills, but not much more. And it's mainly more fun than business for me, but fortunately, as I say, it does pay the bills. And my channels focus on a blend of things, mainly model aircraft and drones and things, but also I delve into electronics. But I see my Ohm's Law videos at over a million views, which is not bad.

Dave Jones: Excellent. Wow.

Bruce Simpson: Muscling in on your territory, Dave.

Dave Jones: You are. Oh, I'm going to have to get my act together.

Bruce Simpson: So, yeah, I come from a background in electronics, so that was what I did first straight out of school. I got into electronics and had a lot of fun and spent, I don't know, what was it, 10, 15 years in that. Then I got into computers from a hardware perspective and got into software and then got into the Internet and then retired. And now I'm doing this.

Dave Jones: Oh, brilliant. So, yeah, I don't think we've had anyone ever be on a bit like and talk about RC stuff because that's the focus of your channel, remote control, not just quobcopters, because that's all anyone talks about these days. Yeah. Right. It just dominates everything. But you're also being caught up in many controversies, which I'm sure we'll get into, no doubt. But, yeah, well, let's talk about – well, actually, yeah, let's start off. Let's start off with the juicy stuff. Yeah, why not? The Missile Man.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: You famously hit the scene. You exploded the Internet back in, I don't know, the 2000s when you claimed to have a do-it-yourself cruise missile.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, that was a really interesting chapter in my life and the book, which you'll be able to buy on Amazon soon.

Dave Jones: Oh, excellent. Yeah, I've been waiting for it years. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble.

Bruce Simpson: When I first wrote the book and I submitted it to Amazon, they said, thanks, but no thanks. It doesn't meet our criteria for acceptable content. Really? Yeah, because it was all very hot at the time and it was very topical. And with the 9-11 and the recent past, I think they wanted to steer world clear of anything like that. But now it seems okay, so I will be publishing that. But, yeah, it was – to give you some background, I had just sold an Internet business, which was one of the first syndicated online news services. And I had a healthy amount of money and a lot of time on my hands, so I thought, oh, I'll just develop some jet engines, which I've always had an interest in, pulse jet engines. Oh. And while I was doing that, I realized, well, these things are incredibly simple from an engineering perspective. And, gosh, you know, you can go out there and buy all the bits you need to make a cruise missile if you wanted to, because cruise missiles were, you know, big things at that stage too. They were all new and shiny and everyone was talking about them. So I went out and I bought all the materials to make a cruise missile. And I developed my own flight controller, my own guidance system, and built the engine, built the airframe. And I thought, if I can do this, then other people with nefarious intent could do it also. So I tried to publicize the fact that this was something that people should be thinking about, and especially governments and so forth. And I expected that I'd get feedback saying, oh, that's great, you know, tell us more.

Dave Jones: Ah, yes.

Bruce Simpson: But, in fact, it was a case of, don't tell anybody. You know, we're sure that the bad people will never have thought of this themselves, and you might alert them to the possibility.

Speaker ?: Oh, goodness.

Bruce Simpson: So typical politicians and bureaucrats bungling, you know, if someone presents an inconvenient fact, you try and shut them up. That's what you do. You don't respond to the facts. You do the ad hominem and you say, oh, no, no, let's suppress that information, which is because if we don't tell them, they'll never think of it, the bad guys.

Dave Jones: And so what parties are we talking about here who wanted you to suppress all this stuff?

Bruce Simpson: It was the, interestingly enough, the New Zealand government was pretty naive because they, the Prime Minister actually stated that Mr. Simpson is breaking no laws and we see no harm in what he's doing. Really? That's what she said publicly when the media questioned her on it. Wow. Is it sensible for some guy to be building a cruise missile in his garage? And that's what she said. However, the US Defence Department changed her mind. They came back very rapidly and said, this is not a good idea. And very shortly afterwards, the whole government position changed because the US government didn't want this fact widely known. Even though I had a lot of emails from people in the US military saying, thank you for raising this. We've been aware of this and nobody's listening.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me that it was pushed from other avenues. But didn't the New Zealand military at the time say, hey, we've got no capability to stop this? Because New Zealand famously doesn't have much of a, well, it doesn't have much of a defence force left, does it?

Bruce Simpson: I mean, it's a bit like our space program is a ladder. Right.

Dave Jones: Sounds like our space program here in Australia. Oh, it's hilarious. Follow the Australian, I don't know what they call themselves, the Australian Space Agency or something. And they just tweet photos of like offices with chairs and stuff. And that's about it. It's rather hilarious. But did the New Zealand military comment on it?

Bruce Simpson: No, I had very little feedback from the New Zealand military. And it was kind of interesting. But things got even more exciting because I put up a webpage and a website just showing what I was doing. Not showing how to do it, but just highlighting the fact that this could be done. And I was starting to get emails from some very interesting places, from Iran, from Pakistan, and people offering me large amounts of money for the plans to my missile. Oh, wow. And being the patriotic person I am, I referred to our local security people, the SIS, the Security Intelligence Service. And I sent them an email and said, look, I'm getting these communications. Here are copies of them for your information. And they said, yes, we know you're getting those emails. And I said, okay. They said, we'd like to talk to you. They knew you were getting them? They knew I was getting the emails. So obviously they were keeping an eye on things. And they said, we would like to talk to you. And I said, okay, fine. Come out and see me. And at that stage, I lived right out in the country and down a gravel, you know, dirt road. And it was pretty hard to find. I said, I'll send you a map. They said, don't worry. We know where you live.

Dave Jones: This is great.

Bruce Simpson: And sure enough, a couple of days later, this little Ford car pulls up, little blue Ford car. And now it gets this guy in a nylon shirt and polyester trousers and a clipboard and his little mate. And they come in and they chatted away. I learned some incredibly interesting stuff about how the secret services work in this country. Yeah. He said, yeah, thank you for all the information. We need to keep a dossier on this. And we are aware of things that are going on. And basically, he was an agent, but he was like a clerk. You know, he was the kind of guy that does the paperwork. And that's who they sent out. But it was good. It was a lot of fun.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's terrific. So what sort of stuff did you share? Did you share like test videos and photos or what sort of stuff?

Bruce Simpson: No, I was pretty careful. I did a few photos of the build and stuff like that, of the airframe and so forth and some of the component pictures. But actually, one of the best things was I was in my garage working away and an officer from the local council rolled up in his little council car and said, I understand you've got rocket fuel here.

Dave Jones: Don't worry about the actual rocket, the cruise missile. No, you've got fuel.

Bruce Simpson: I said, no. I said, he said, well, you've got rocket motors. I've seen it in the paper. I said, no, I have jet engines and they run on the same fuel you'd put in your car or use in your barbecue. Can you show me, please?

Dave Jones: Oh, that's great. Oh, we could talk about the politics of this forever. But this is a technical podcast. So people want to know. I mean, I know nothing about jet engines or pulse jets. How is this? How is it? You call it the X-Jet, right?

Bruce Simpson: Well, that was one piece of technology I was developing. Because pulse jets were developed back in the 1920s and 30s and the first real use was in the V1 flying bomb that the Germans used. Oh, that was actually pulse jet, was it? That was a pulse jet. Yeah, the V2 was a rocket, but the V1 was a pulse jet. And there had been no development really subsequent to that. The Americans did a little bit in the 50s with valveless pulse jets, but then the technology was basically forgotten for a long time. Until I started doing the pulse jet engines and then a new form of pulse jet called pulse detonation engines came out, which is supposedly very, very efficient because they use very high compression ratios. And the higher the compression ratio, the better the thermal efficiency and the more power you get out of your fuel. Now, I had developed or had developed and still have the technology that produces something sort of halfway between a detonation and the sort of normal burning you get in a pulse jet engine.

Dave Jones: Right. When you say detonation, what does that entail?

Bruce Simpson: Well, normally when you burn fuel, it deflagrates. That is to say that the flame front travels at just a few metres a second. You can visualise this. If you lay a trail of petrol on the ground and light one end, it burns along relatively slowly. And that's a deflagration. That's like you get in your car engine when the fuel's ignited and if you light, if the pulse jet engine combusts. Now, with a detonation, you have a supersonic flame front. So that's as you would get with dynamite, where the actual speed of the combustion travels at around about 6,000 or 7,000 metres a second, which is a lot faster than deflagration. So the transition from deflagration to detonation produces a massive increase in the amount of power you get out of a certain amount of fuel. It also means that the air coming out of a pulse detonation engine is travelling supersonic, so you can use it to propel craft beyond sonic speeds. Beyond sonic speeds. So I looked at it and said, well, you know, what if you were to produce a deflagration at a flame front that was faster than deflagration but slower than detonation? And I developed some internal architecture which basically set the air fuel mixture very, very close to ignition point and then used a sonic wave that is a pressure wave travelling at the speed of sound to ignite it. So the flame front travelled at almost the speed of sound. So it was halfway between deflagration and detonation.

Dave Jones: So you pre-mixed it kind of thing beforehand?

Bruce Simpson: Well, it's normally pre-mixed, but what happens with a normal pulse jet engine is that the charge that's waiting to be burnt is ignited by hot gases being drawn back through the tailpipe. So that just sort of burns through that mixture. However, if you have the mixture in a certain state, it is so close to combustion that even the sound wave, the pressure wave, not just the hot gases, will ignite it. Because as the pressure wave passes through, it increases the pressure just enough to get to the flash point of the air fuel mixture. So by doing that, the combustion cycle was much shorter and the pressures produced are much greater, which means you get more power. But the problem with detonation engines is it's very, very difficult to get an air fuel mixture to detonate. So the engines that they're developing, the military are developing, are great big long things and they have valves and turbocharger inputs and things. They're very, very complex and heavy. So by simply changing the way the gas flow worked inside my pulse jet engine, I was able to achieve this, what I call high magnitude combustion, which is very close to a detonation, but still a deflagration. It's a couple of orders of magnitude more energy than you get from a normal deflagration.

Dave Jones: Right. So what kind of speeds would yours have been capable of?

Bruce Simpson: Well, the exhaust gases are still subsonic, but the pulse cycle is very high and the amount of pressure you get or the amount of energy you get, what's called the specific impulse you get from a certain amount of fuel and air is much higher.

Dave Jones: About 800 kilometres an hour or something, right?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the problem with traditional pulse jets like on the V1, they're an incredibly useful way of converting fuel into a tiny bit of thrust and a lot of heat. And so when you change the combustion, you get more thrust and less heat, which is kind of the goal of the whole thing.

Dave Jones: Why did they change from the V1 from pulse jet to rockets on the V2?

Bruce Simpson: Well, the V1 was a cruise missile. It flew. So towards the end of the war, they were knocking them out of the sky with the Spitfires and the meteors because they could fly as fast and just tip it over and the gyros would go to lock and it would crash.

Dave Jones: Ah, interesting.

Bruce Simpson: Whereas the V1 is a ballistic weapon. It comes in at several thousand miles an hour. There's just no way to stop it.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. Well, that sounds like a step backwards for the V2 then, doesn't it?

Bruce Simpson: Well, no, the V2 was not as accurate, but it was completely, you couldn't stop it at all. Once it left the pad.

Dave Jones: Let's get into the flight control systems because we're talking like what, mid 2000s, early 2000s?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, early 2000s.

Dave Jones: Right. So you don't have the evolution of flight control technology like you do these days. I mean, you wouldn't have bothered designing your own one these days, would you? You'd just have some off the shelf thing.

Bruce Simpson: No, and also I didn't have access to the very low cost accelerometers and gyros, that MEMS technology that's now so readily available for that sort of application. So my flight control was built around thermopiles, infrared sensors, because as we know, the sky is a different temperature to the ground. So I had infrared sensors on each wingtip and on the nose and underneath so that if the craft banked, I could tell because one wing would get warmer and one would get colder. And if it pitched, you could do the same thing. And that even works at night, surprisingly, although the temperatures tend to be reversed.

Dave Jones: Oh, you're right. OK, so you have to change the profile at night.

Bruce Simpson: It doesn't work over water because water tends to get bad. Also, it reflects the infrared. So there's some limitations.

Dave Jones: I was going to say it actually reflects as well. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. The limitation is that technology, but, you know, it was perfectly practical. And I also looked at using the electrostatic gradient. That's another thing that was used before gyros because there's an electrostatic gradient from the earth to the top of the atmosphere. And if you've got sensors in enough gear and electro or sensors on each wingtip, you can measure how far the craft is banked by the change in electrical potential.

Dave Jones: Wow. Yeah, I've heard about that. But right off the top of my head, without knowing anything about this, I know enough to be dangerous, is that trying to measure something like that at speed, at great speed, would not be possible, would it? Or it would really upset it.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, there are autopilots that do rely on that or did in the early days rely on that. Yeah, there's ways to mitigate that because any static buildup is going to be pretty balanced on both wings.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, yeah, static buildup over the winds and all the rest of it.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, but just don't fly in a thunderstorm.

Dave Jones: Oh, right. Wow. So how accurate would it be using those thermal sensors? Like, you know, what sort of height could you maintain? Would it like just gyrate around, up and down, side to side?

Bruce Simpson: It's surprisingly stable. I tested with some models and you could basically get the model inverted and then hit the stabilize button and it would pop itself upright in less than a second. There is such a powerful gradient between those things. And it doesn't have to be that good because we're not talking about having people in it as long as it does the job. You know, if it rock and rolls, we don't really care very much. So, yeah, it was perfectly adequate.

Dave Jones: And what's the distance that you could probably get out of this?

Bruce Simpson: Well, the engine or the craft itself probably had a top speed of around about 600 kilometers an hour. Yeah. And it had a fuel tank capacity which would run it for about 15 minutes. So you can work that out. That's 10 kilometers a minute for 15 minutes.

Dave Jones: Okay. So 100, 150 Ks, something like that. What's the trade-off with weight versus range and fuel and all that sort of jazz?

Bruce Simpson: You have to divvy it up. You can sacrifice payload for fuel load and get longer range but less effectiveness, you know.

Dave Jones: Right. And how much could it carry? How many kilos?

Bruce Simpson: It was designed to carry a 10 kilogram payload.

Dave Jones: So these days you just wouldn't bother. You'd use GPS and just what would be the off-the-shelf solution these days if you wanted to build your own do-it-yourself cruise missile?

Bruce Simpson: This is going to get us podcast banned but, you know. Exactly. But you can buy a little flight controller, a cheap Chinese flight controller with an F7 processor and the gyros and the accelerometers for around about 60 bucks. You can throw a $30 GPS unit on it and a $10 compass and you've got everything you need.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Can we talk about like the history and development of this sort of stuff? I mean, what were the advances in, you know, because you can buy a drone for like 10 bucks now, one of these little micro hand drones or whatever, 10, 20 bucks or something, can't you? Yeah. You know, just absolutely incredible. What's been the evolutionary drivers in the technology that's enabled all this quadcopter craze that's going on? Can you take us way back? How far back can you go?

Bruce Simpson: Well, my first multi-rotor, as it was called, was a tricopter, three motors, and instead of using, we used gyros or helicopters, which at one stage were mechanical devices but pretty soon became, you know, solid state devices. So we just used three gyros and three motors and that worked fine. Then the purpose-made boards started coming out based on multi-Wii and they were quite popular for a while and then it progressed and it's just gone on and on and the software has kept pace. So it's been quite a fairly rapid evolution and it's driven a lot of the stuff, the sensors and that are basically all out of smartphones with the accelerometers and the gyros and barometers and so forth.

Dave Jones: When did the quadcopter craze really take off? What year was it roughly?

Bruce Simpson: Well, I built my first mini quad, which is like the freestyle racing quads, in 2015 and that was thanks to an Australian. And it was a guy called Blackout the Drunk who popularized, he was the guy that commercialized the idea of making a frame out of carbon fiber so it wouldn't break and throwing on four motors and a flight controller. And that craft just changed the world. It started the whole craze you're seeing now with all these racing drones and things and I guess he made his money out of that and moved on. But it was really a breakthrough moment because it was the first time you could buy something, fly straight into a tree or a building and not have to buy a new one.

Dave Jones: Wow. What's the state of the open source stuff? Because I built one like 10 years ago, it was based on the Arducopter, one of the early Arducopter platforms and back when you had to build him yourself, you couldn't really buy like a commercial drone. What's the state of the open source stuff these days?

Bruce Simpson: Well, Arducopter is still going. It's a very popular software platform used in a lot of commercial operations now. It's become sort of like the standard. In the hobby recreational field with the freestyle and the racing drones, it's a whole lot. There was originally a product called BaseFlight, which was a very simple flight controller. And out of that came something called CleanFlight. And then that split off into BetaFlight. And now you've got EmuFlight. And there's a whole lot of different flights, RaceFlight. So as is the case with so many open source projects, and they're all open source, someone takes the source code and goes, I can improve on this. I can make it better. We'll fork it here and I'll do my fork. So there's probably four or five forks of the original code out there now. Some have been totally rewritten. But there's some that, especially for racing, like RaceFlight and EmuFlight. And there's others such as iNav, which include GPS and Compass and more autonomous facilities. But it's all open source and readily available, no cost.

Dave Jones: Can you possibly explain how these flight controllers actually work from a point of view of, like, you know, what sensor inputs do they need? What PID controllers? Is it even a PID controller? What kind of thing keeps a quadcopter in the air?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, it used to be just, you know, three accelerometers, two accelerometers and three gyros and a little bit of microcontroller holding it all together. And that's why the performance of the early flight controllers was pretty limited. They were hard to tune. It was pretty crude, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes just vibration would completely destroy them in terms of, you know, their corrective facilities. But as things have got better, processes are faster. We've got more memory so you can have more complex code. It's really sophisticated now. I mean, they have multiple PID loops. And the tuning options are incredible. You know, you can have all sorts of factors. And they've got dynamic filters to tune out vibration and so much stuff in there now that you... Fortunately, most of the defaults just work. But if you really want to, you can spend the rest of your life tuning a quad to be perfect.

Dave Jones: So for all sorts of different applications, will the algorithms change with, like, you know, payload and what type of environment you're flying in and stuff like that? Or do they all just kind of, like, handle universal environment stuff?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, the basics are there. But you'll have to change your filtering because a larger craft will require lower filters because the filters will be tuned lower because the motors are spinning slower. So the resonant vibrations you might reach are going to be lower in the spectrum. And also because by the smaller craft, the moment of inertia is lower. So your PIDs will be quite different. But because these processes now, like the F7 and so forth, have got so much computing power. I mean, we're talking, you know, 32-bit processes, isn't it? Oh, yeah, nuts. That they can build the defaults so that it doesn't matter if the tuning is not quite right because, you know, everything works so well. And there's so much overhead in terms of managing the PID loops. So it's just, they just work.

Dave Jones: Now, you've had a lot of, recently in the last couple of years, I've seen a lot of your videos on, it's not the, who's the regulation authority in the air regulation authority in New Zealand?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, we've got an organisation called CIA, the Civil Aviation Authority. CIA, that's it. Yeah, the equivalent of CASA in Australia and the FAA.

Dave Jones: So you've had a lot of run-ins with them. Yeah. What's the deal there? Because they've tried to take away your licence and they've tried to do all sorts of shenanigans, haven't they?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, it all boils down to people. I mean, ultimately, regulations and regulators and authorities are only as good as the people behind them. Sometimes people are good, sometimes people are bad. I'm a very polarising influence. Politicians and bureaucrats generally either love me or they hate me. And there's very little middle ground. The surprising thing is, I'm very quick to criticise, but I'm very quick to praise. If someone's doing a good job, I'll praise them and commend them on it. But if they're doing a bad job, I'll criticise them, and quite rightly. So you can generally tell how good a politician or a bureaucrat is at their job by what they think of me. If they're doing their job properly, they think I'm wonderful because I've praised them. And if they're doing a bad job, they'll hate me because I've criticised them. So, you know, what they say...

Dave Jones: The government litmus test.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, what they say says more about them than me.

Dave Jones: Like, what have they tried to do to you? Because they have tried to shut you down, and then there was a thing about, oh, you're flying dangerously and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Bruce Simpson: Of course, there's a lot of people in the world who don't like to see other people having fun. Yeah, of course. And they'll find any excuse to stop you. And so when we had a lockdown here exactly 12 months ago, they started our lockdown. It was six weeks, I think. And during that time, I did a lot of flying because I was living next to a lake and I could safely fly my drones out over the lake. The thing being that if something went wrong and they fell, they'd fall in the water. No one was going to get hurt. No disease would be spread. It was perfectly safe for me to do so. So I flew my drones over this large lake in town. And some people didn't like that, probably because they were locked away in their little...

Dave Jones: And they couldn't have fun.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, they couldn't have fun, so you're not going to have fun either. And so they complained to the Civil Aviation Authority about me. And of course, the CIA, given that there were no manned aircraft in the air at the time, they had to do something with their time. So why not get stuck right in and investigate this guy here, you know, who's criticised us in the past.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right.

Bruce Simpson: The outcome was inevitable.

Dave Jones: Did they succeed? No. No.

Bruce Simpson: No, because ultimately I had done everything by the book. And some of the things like, you know, you were flying without an observer or a spotter. And just because you didn't see one in my video doesn't mean there wasn't one there. How are you going to prove that? And so there's a lot of, you know, ups and downs in that respect. And also my major claim was that the rules are there to preserve safety. So if I was acting safely, the rules were of no relevance. Right. I had a long and drawn out battle with Civil Aviation over that. And interestingly enough, the guy I was battling has now gone. And the new head of Civil Aviation has come out and said, we are very much aware that it is possible to be safe while still technically breaching the regulations, which is what I've been saying to them. And so I don't know whether they realised, gosh, we'd better actually be pragmatic or we're going to continue to look like fools because I did embarrass them on the public stage quite a bit. Maybe they just thought, well, we should just, you know, realise that this is actually the facts. So I'm hoping there'll be a bit of a change in direction from CAA, focusing more on safety issues than compliance issues.

Dave Jones: So what sort of, are there like limits to, you know, there's like, what are the, like the height limits, the speed limits? Do you need different licences for different types of RC craft? What's the deal?

Bruce Simpson: We're pretty lucky in New Zealand in some ways and unlucky in others. For example, in Australia, you're going to have to register yourself if you fly drones soon. Commercial operators have to register.

Dave Jones: Right.

Bruce Simpson: So, but in New Zealand, there's no plans for that yet, but I'm pretty sure it will come. And in most countries, you're limited to 400 feet. I mean, it's common sense stuff. If you're going to have manned aircraft flying 500 feet and above, it makes sense to keep the unmanned aircraft 400 feet and below, giving you 100 feet of vertical separation. And if everybody follows the rules, there should never be any risk of a collision. And so those are common sense rules around the world. What is a little bit up for debate is the difference in risk profile for a small craft versus a large craft. Because here in New Zealand, I've challenged CAA because they claim our regulations are risk-based. Yet exactly the same rules apply to one of those little $10, 20-gram toy quadcopters. Yeah, right. As applies to a 15-gram commercial quadcopter with a great big red camera hanging off the bottom of it. So I don't see how they can claim that that's risk-based regulation.

Dave Jones: No, it's not. Oh, goodness. You know, that wouldn't, it might, I don't know, chop one of your hairs on your head off if a little hand one.

Bruce Simpson: The little ones are choking hazard. Is that sort of... Oh, I'm joking.

Speaker ?: Yeah, they're that small.

Dave Jones: What's the smallest one you've seen? What's the smallest quadcopter on the market? How...

Bruce Simpson: Well, there's one called a Chia's and CX-10, which was 20 grams. I've got a tiny whip, which is with a FPV camera, the full flight controller and everything. And it is 20... 22 grams, I think. 22 grams. Yep.

Dave Jones: God, what has it got?

Bruce Simpson: No solder in it? I mean... I know, it's amazing what they can do. It's just, they're just so small and versatile. But the thing is that, the thing that amazes me is that we have the same problem everywhere in the world. All the drones are the same. The airspace is the same. So why do we have such a wide difference in regulation? If you live in Canada and you've got a drone that weighs less than 250 grams, there are no prescriptive rules. They just say, do not endanger people, property or aviation. That's it. Right. That's all you're going to do. Whereas in New Zealand, the same prescriptive rules apply to that craft as one that weighs 10 times as much. That's nuts.

Dave Jones: I almost got one of those DJI drones just to, you know, shoot some aerial footage and stuff like that. But I've been hearing, it's probably old news now. I'm sure it is because I don't follow the market. But they're like geo-locked. They come like pre-programmed to geo. Like they won't fly into certain spaces. What is it? Geofencing or something? Geofencing. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: I've got the new FPV drone that DJI did. It does 80 miles an hour and it's, you know, it's got a 4K 60p camera. And I normally fly at our local airfield where I've got all permissions and things and my hang is based and the club flies. Can't fly it there. Because even though, in theory, I own the drone, DJI tell me where and when I can fly.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. And that gets, and do they force you to get like the firmware updates, which then change the geo, update the geofencing. And they go, they could suddenly decide, oh, we don't like New Zealand anymore. You can't fly it in New Zealand or you can't fly it in China at all.

Bruce Simpson: It's almost like this right to repair. When you buy something, do you actually own it? Yes. Just borrowing it.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Because I had this with a DJI little camcorder thing. It was one of those little gyro stabilizers. Yeah. Yeah. The Osmo thing. I did a video ranting about this. How like after five power ups, like I bought it, paid my own money for it. I got the physical object and it would only record video five times before it bricked itself and said, you must register this via our app. Yeah. Otherwise you can't use it. It physically stopped working.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. It's ridiculous.

Dave Jones: Like what the hell?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. DJI sent me this drone for free to review. But I did a video, the 10 reasons why you won't want to buy it. And one of them is that it's geofenced and you don't really own it. You're just at their discretion. So yeah, because people send me stuff to review, but I don't use affiliate links. And if someone sends me stuff, I just tell it like it is. I'm not into monetizing by trying to pitch it as a sales pitch. That's why I've got so many subscribers, I think, on my RC Model Reviews channels. It's 200, no, it's your 200 and something thousand. I don't keep track. But it's because I'm the first guy that when people sent me stuff to review, I'd still say it was crap if it was crap.

Dave Jones: Yep. Sounds like my channel. Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't get you very far, but it does endear to the audiences, I think.

Bruce Simpson: Well, ultimately, the responsibility is to make sure that the audience is informed. And if you're not going to do that, you shouldn't be claiming to be an objective reviewer, is it?

Dave Jones: No, that's right. But, I mean, DJ and I haven't always done this, have they? Is it relatively new-ish? They've done it for a long time.

Bruce Simpson: They've done it for quite a long time.

Bruce Simpson: Okay. It's really annoying because they say, oh, we're doing this because you're not allowed to fly near airports. So we're making sure that people follow the rules by not letting them.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. Yes. So they get that wedge in. They get that little, yeah.

Bruce Simpson: The hypocrisy is that you're also not allowed to fly a drone beyond visual line of sight, which typically for an average drone is probably 800 meters to 1,000 meters. Yet, they advertise this as a range of up to 10 kilometers, and they don't limit it. They don't say, well, you can only fly to one kilometer because we know if you go beyond that, you're flying beyond visual line of sight. And every country in the world has a law that says you may not fly a drone beyond visual line of sight. But DJ and I don't choose to restrict people in that regard. And, you know, I'm thinking, why not?

Dave Jones: Interesting. Yeah. And that's all driven, of course, not by DJI. I'm sure that's driven by the Chinese government. I'm sure that's a government initiative. Would it not be?

Bruce Simpson: I don't know. Or am I being too conspiratorial? I think DJI has copped so much flack because every time there was an incident where a drone was seen near an airfield, the papers carried pictures of a DJI drone. So they wanted to say, couldn't have been us, couldn't have been us.

Dave Jones: Couldn't have been us. Haven't the U.S. government banned DJI products? Yeah. Right.

Bruce Simpson: And no federal agency can use them. And no one's allowed to fly over federal land with a DJI drone because they're going to, just like the Tislas, they're going to spy.

Dave Jones: They're going to spy. Okay. With our alfoil hats on.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is it called an alfoil hat in? Tin foil. Or is it a tin foil? Tin foil. Still tin foil. Yankee tin foil. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alfoil hat. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: So is that aluminum foil or aluminium foil?

Dave Jones: Aluminium foil. Of course. Yeah. They're not none of this aluminum rubbish. I know. Yankee aluminum. them. What the hell is that? That's not even a word. So is it true you live in Austria, Dave? Austria, yes, with kangaroos, yeah. Oh, I'll try not to involve any sheep jokes in this

Bruce Simpson: recording. I'll take my Velcro gloves off then, eh?

Dave Jones: And I won't try and use any numbers that involve six. No, definitely not. Because you won't be able to pronounce six.

Bruce Simpson: Or takeaways involving fish and

Dave Jones: chips. Fish and chups. Has that impacted, has that changed people's perception of the DJI drones? Because they were the biggest, weren't they? Are they still the biggest? Yeah, they're still the

Bruce Simpson: biggest. They've still got the lion's share of the consumer market. And the USA has been very protectionist because now they've got a thing called the Blue List. And government agencies can only buy drones on the Blue List. And there are five or six drones on the Blue List, but I think you can actually only buy about one of them.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. What, they'll ban imports?

Bruce Simpson: Or what? Well, they just, they will not fund federal agencies to purchase them. Oh, it's a federal. Okay.

Dave Jones: But privately, of course, you can still buy a spy device, your Chinese spy drone. Yeah. Great. So, who are the other major players? Who are the best in the market?

Bruce Simpson: There's Autel, which has got quite a following. And there's Parrot, which is a European company. Oh yeah, heard of that. They won at the very first, of course. They're still going. What else is there? There's, the really interesting one is the one that's got full of AI and it avoids obstacles. Trying to remember the name of it now, because I'm old and I forget stuff. But it's based on NVIDIA processes and it has so much AI that it can, you can walk through a forest and it will follow you avoiding all the branches and twigs. Skydio. That's it. Skydio. I knew it would come to me.

Dave Jones: Ah, because there was that famous one that it was, it was a Kickstarter and it went bust.

Bruce Simpson: Oh yeah, there's been heaps of them. There was a Lily, Lily drone.

Dave Jones: Lily, Lily drones. That's right. Yes. They, they actually tried to shut down one of my videos and, and many other videos critiquing because the company that bought them, I can't remember their name. I've done a video on it. The company that bought the IP rights when they went bust, they, they decided, oh, we want to scrub the internet of anything to do with the brand that we just bought. Yeah. So anything with the word, Lily drones in it, they actually put in a DMCA, uh, no, a trademark. They put in a trademark, uh, dispute that, yeah, try to take down all these YouTube videos. So that failed. I, uh, laid it, laid it out to their, uh, legal counsel and their legal counsel backed off and said, yeah, yep, you're right. Can't do anything about it. Oops. Yeah. Dickheads. Anyway, I've, I've always wondered like why most drones are for rotor, right? But you can get three. You said that you started off with three, right? And there's like Octa drones, aren't there? Like some of the real huge firefighting drones. What's the trade off and what's the pros and cons of all different numbers?

Bruce Simpson: Well, when you get to larger quads, of course, if you're building a quad cop, you need much bigger motors and props. And the, the price of these things doesn't scale very linearly. So it's often cheaper to have eight small motors and props than four big ones. And also with the bigger, the bigger quads are usually carrying more valuable payloads and more risky. So they might be carrying a red camera, which on its own might be worth 20 grand. Yeah. So you want some redundancy. And the, and the thing is that if you've got eight propellers and one of them stops, you've still got a measure of control and you can get it down safely. If you've got four propellers and one stops, you've got a small windowless building toppling from the sky. Yeah. But you can use three. Yeah. You can use three. It's interesting because with the quad copter, you use the torque of the motors to control the yaw and the power of the motors to control the roll and the pitch. With the tricopter, you have the rear motor actually tilts left and right to give you your capability. So the thrust vector is altered to give you your and, and the, the other props act the thrust difference changes your pitch and your roll. So you get away with one less motor, but you've got to have an articulated mount for that motor, the rear motor, so it can rock left and right.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? Like on a, like on a helicopter?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's similar. The whole motor usually rocks rather than just the propeller.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. And you don't need that on a four rotor quad copter.

Bruce Simpson: No, there's no moving parts apart from the motors, the shafts and the props.

Dave Jones: Right. So a four, there's no way that a four rotor quad copter can stay in the air with only three.

Bruce Simpson: No, there is ways you can, what you can do is put it into a spin so that the, that it's spinning so fast that the, that it doesn't topple, but that's, you lose a lot of control then. It's very difficult. And some companies claim this as a feature, but sometimes when they test them, they just fall.

Dave Jones: So they'll automatically go into a spin mode, will they? Like a auto rotation

Bruce Simpson: kind of thing.

Dave Jones: Like I'm going to land heavy, but.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. If they weren't spinning, then they'd obviously tip towards the dead motor. But if you spin fast enough, that dead motor is moving around. So it's always falling towards a moving motor. If you imagine that the dead motor is moved out of the way and that moment of movement is now supported by another motor.

Dave Jones: Right. Got it. Okay. And what happens on say an eight, you won't have an odd number of rotors, will you? Would you ever have an odd number? Like apart from three?

Bruce Simpson: You usually have them in an even number. And there's a thing called an X8, which is like a quadcopter, but it has a motor on top of the arm and a motor on the bottom. So the props are stacked.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yes. Yes, of course. I've seen those. What's the advantage? What's the aerodynamic advantage of having them? And are they? And they're aligned, aren't they? So the top and bottom ones are aligned. They're not perpendicular, right?

Bruce Simpson: Well, they're parallel to each other.

Dave Jones: Yes.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. The advantage is it's easier from a control perspective, because if you lose a motor, then it's just still a quadcopter, but it's got less power on one side. With an octocopter, if you lose a motor, it's a more complicated to balance it. So, yeah.

Dave Jones: Oh, sorry. It's got a motor on the top and a motor underneath as well. Yeah. Oh, driving independently. Oh, okay. So they're not. Ah, gotcha. Okay. Right. And that provides you greater redundancy and control.

Bruce Simpson: It depends how you look at it, though, because I've always been a believer in the KISS principle. And the more you've got, the more you've got to go wrong.

Dave Jones: Right. But then again, if you're carrying that $20,000 RED camera, you know.

Bruce Simpson: Now I've got insurance.

Dave Jones: You want to be. Yeah, that's what insurance is for. Yeah. No worries. Some of them have, like, guard rings around them. Does that change the aerodynamic? Because some of them, like, they'll almost be like a tunnel kind of thing.

Dave Jones: And that's not just for protection of the blades, right? There is some aerodynamic tip effects, isn't there? Or...

Bruce Simpson: There could be. There could be. But I have yet to see one that's manufactured properly to do that because the tolerance is... Right. ...clearance between the propeller and the shroud has to be very, very tight, like in a jet engine, to get that effect. And you can actually get a lot more lift because as you're sucking air down, if it comes over a rounded lip on the top or the entrance to the duct, the Coander effect provides lift by creating a low pressure area on the top of the duct around the edge. And that's why... Yep. You've probably seen the Hiller Flying Platform, that thing from the 1950s where the guy stands on it and it flies. Oh, yes. Yes, that's great. I think over 40% of the lift created by that platform was due to the Coander effect on the rounded lip of the duct, not the actual propellers itself. Yeah. Wow. That's also a negative because they found that they couldn't get much speed out of it because as you started moving forward, the Coander effect on the leading edge of the duct was higher than on the trailing edge and therefore it would self-right itself all the time. So you couldn't maintain a high enough level of angle to get a good forward speed.

Dave Jones: Ah, because there's been a lot of Kickstarter... Well, there's been Kickstarter-y scams and other even big commercial scams worth millions or hundreds of millions of dollars involving wind turbines that try and put them in ducted tunnels to try and beat Betts' law, right? Yeah. Have you got any input on that? I mean, in theory it's possible to beat Betts' law, isn't it? But in practice you can't?

Bruce Simpson: No, there's much, much better ways I think to try and get a free lunch. But it surprises me, when you look at these Kickstarters and the number of people that sign up to things that are patently ludicrous and based on snake oil, do they not... Is science not a subject in school anymore? I mean, what's going on? Do they not teach healthy scepticism?

Dave Jones: There's some people that say that I'm wasting... My esteemed co-host, I think, is in this camp, that I'm wasting my time doing debunking videos and stuff. What's your opinion?

Bruce Simpson: No, they're essential. You know, they're really good for revenue and it's important to educate people. I did one that was a model, RC Jet, which is worth about $500, $600 or more in the USA, being sold for $19.95 on the internet. And I just did a debunking, went through it. And it's interesting because the comments are full of people saying, oh, I wish I'd seen this video before because I've just ordered it or I ordered it and I got a little tiny plywood model, you know, two inches long. And I'm thinking, seriously, did you... If it sounds too good to be true, you know what the answer is.

Speaker ?: Right.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. Haven't you done stuff on, like, water-powered cars and hydrogen cars and stuff like that? Oh, yes. What's your take on, you know, powering a car from water and et cetera?

Bruce Simpson: You just did the basic math. The laws of thermodynamics have yet to be breached and there's no way you're going to get more energy out of separating water, out of joining hydrogen oxygen than it takes to separate it from water. It is crazy. And it's interesting because some of these snake oil merchants drag up, you know, SAE papers or NASA papers showing that hydrogen can improve the efficiency of combustion by 0.005% if you use, like, 30% of it by volumes. But you go back and do the math and say, yeah, to get an extra five watts of power out of your engine, you're going to have to put two kilowatts into splitting the water. It just doesn't work. And the ultimate test is that all these people that said, you know, we're running our car on water. If you go and check today, they're not running their car on water. It's just back to good old petrol. Maybe they've got a Tesla, but none of these systems have stood the test of time.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It's like somebody tweeted out a photo the other day of a motor, a generator attached to the wheel of a leaf, a vanessant leaf. So it recharged itself.

Bruce Simpson: That's like plugging your multi-way box, plugging the lead into one of the outlets, isn't it?

Dave Jones: One of the outlets and infinite power. But speaking of bureaucrats and

Bruce Simpson: politicians, one of our party leaders in New Zealand a few years ago suggested and promoted that the government buy magnetic fuel savers for its fleet because apparently it was going to save them millions of dollars a year.

Dave Jones: Oh, really? And they're complete bunk, aren't they? Absolutely.

Bruce Simpson: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yep. Oh, because I did a debunking video of those ODB.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: You know, those ODB fuel saver things. And there's nothing. It's not even connected to the CAN bus. I know. Like, it's just fake blinking lights. And it's like, oh my goodness.

Bruce Simpson: Placebo is a powerful thing.

Dave Jones: Oh, it is. And people will swear by it. Like, genuine people will actually buy this and think that it actually makes a difference because their driving habits will subtly change and they won't realize it. Or they, you know, I've always said that if you pay, you know, $8,000 for a speaker cable, you're going to hear the difference. Absolutely. You know, you're guaranteed to.

Bruce Simpson: Well, what I love are those cryogenically treated power cables for the audiophiles use that you plug into the wall to the normal copper wire, you know.

Dave Jones: Oh, but you can get special doodad boxes and, you know, that plug in. Or you can get these. My favorite is one of the black boxes that just sits in your room and it absorbs all the, you know, bad electricity and stuff. Yeah, that's not as good as the USB

Bruce Simpson: fob I've got that protects you from 5G.

Dave Jones: Oh, yes. I've done a video on that. That's fantastic. Oh, they're wonderful. God, how many of those scams are out there? Oh, too many. Oh, it's just ridiculous. Yeah, what is the answer there? How can we stop it? Is it?

Bruce Simpson: It's education. I think we just have to. It's education. I think the thing that's missing in the schools, my wife taught in school for a while, is to teach people the importance of cynicism. Don't take everything at face value, certainly not on the internet. Just be skeptical and research. And we've got the internet now. It's the most powerful tool we've ever had. If you have any doubt, just go and do some research.

Dave Jones: It's incredible. It's like people keep buying these things I've debunked. I'm literally the number one result on Google if you type that thing in. It's not hard. Yeah. So you've got a huge blog website, don't you? Are you publishing almost daily on there or something?

Bruce Simpson: My blog?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, I've been doing that. I think I'm probably one of, if not the oldest or longest running blog in the world. It's my 26th or 27th year now.

Dave Jones: Whoa.

Bruce Simpson: And it started out because when I got online, I thought, what can I do? I'd already been to the three websites that existed back then. I thought, I'll make one of my own. And I got stuck into that. And because of the whole technology, the internet was evolving so quickly, there's always something to write about something new, some new piece of software or technology. And it was great. It kept me in touch with the other people using their technology. And it meant I had to go out and learn stuff. And so I just kept at it day after day. And now I just write drivel every weekday morning.

Dave Jones: Every day? Yeah, weekdays. Every weekday. Wow. Oh, geez. Hats off for sheer persistence. That's just incredible.

Bruce Simpson: Well, it's kind of for my own benefit because it means that I'm not tempted to spend the morning in bed because I know if I don't get up and write my blog, people are going to ring me and say, what's happened? Have you died?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Habits have arised. They'll find your warm body instead of your dead body in the shed. Have you done electronics related videos on your channel?

Bruce Simpson: On my RC Bottle Reviews channel, I've done basics and bar F theory, like how antennas work and some Ohm's Law stuff, how to solder. Everyone's done a how to solder video, of course. I've seen yours. They're very good.

Dave Jones: Oh, excellent.

Bruce Simpson: And so, yeah, I've done them as they apply to the hobby because people need to know some of the basics to get full advantage of the gear they're using. You know, there's a lot of electronics in modern model aircraft and drones. So if you don't know about it, you can come across it quite easily. So yeah, I just, there's some more stuff. People love my whiteboard videos, but my whiteboard is stuff. So I bought an electronic one. I'm doing some now. But yeah, I like to educate as well. I did some time in tertiary education lecturing on computer programming and I really enjoyed that.

Dave Jones: Do you find that the hobby is overrun with just people who just buy off the shelf stuff? Is it like, is the do it yourself aspect of the RC industry growing or is it stagnating?

Bruce Simpson: It's dropped off a lot. Back in like maybe even 20 years ago, you had to build stuff because it wasn't, you couldn't afford to buy stuff. It was really expensive. And so you bought your balsa wood and your, you know, your glue out and you glued it together. And, but these days, since the Chinese got involved, it's not so much about building models as flying them. So it's opened the door to a whole lot of people that previously just couldn't be bothered with the patients required to build something. They just buy it and fly it. And I've got to admit, I enjoy flying much more than I enjoy building. So it has brought a lot of new people into the hobby. And also it's so much cheaper now. You could spend, but I bought a model ready to fly and it costs me less than the cost of the covering material for when I was going to build myself.

Dave Jones: It's just, yeah, it's crazy. Have drones overtaken the hobby away from, I assume they would have, over like RC planes and RC copters?

Bruce Simpson: No, there's still a lot of interest in fixed wing, especially amongst the older generation who can't quite get their head around this whole virtual reality thing and the drones. And it has divided into a couple of campuses. Some people are solely drones. Some people are solely fixed wing. I do everything, which is great because the change is as good as a holiday. But yeah, it has created, I think the people, a lot of the people flying drones now never flew model aircraft. They've come in because they like the, it's close, more closely aligned with a computer game than flying a model aircraft.

Dave Jones: Ah, got it. Yeah. So do you prefer like the, the first, the FPV, the, for where you're looking through the, the helmet, you know, where you're looking, you know, the first person view from the drone or do you prefer to fly it by sight?

Bruce Simpson: Line of sight. It's two totally different experiences and I enjoy them both. I don't really have a preference. Sometimes like in the, in the winter where we're at our flying field, the sun is very low on the horizon in the morning. Okay.

Bruce Simpson: Through the sun. In that case, FPV is great. You can fly it any time of the day and you can also fly FPV at night because we've got starlight cameras now with 0.01 lux sensitivity or something. As long as the moon out, half a moon, you can fly like it's daylight. It's brilliant.

Dave Jones: Right. Do, do any of them have like a IR blasters on them so that they light up stuff or is it just not, because you'd only get like 10 meters distance or something, wouldn't you?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah, it's not much. I tried some, some IR leads and you don't, you don't get much in the way of range out of it. It's quite worrying because things just appear out of nowhere. But as I say, with the starlight stuff, if you've got a street light anywhere nearby, it's a piece of cake. And if you've got even half a moon, it's like daylight. There's a little bit of grain. It's usually black and white. Yeah. It's grainy. Yeah. But it's totally flyable.

Dave Jones: Wow. That's yeah. Yeah. The miniature camera technology has just changed everything and transmission technology as well. I mean, you know, how would you transmit video 20 years ago? It would be like hugely high power, you know.

Bruce Simpson: There's an interesting video on YouTube of some guys in the USA that were using analog FPV gear about 20 years ago. And they were using sort of like, you know, the boxes used to use to connect your computer up to the TV, a modulator. They're using that sort of technology, you know, and CCTV cameras with Viticon tubes and things. It's like amazing stuff. But these days it's just amazing because we used to fly analog FPV, which was basically just analog. You just modulated a carrier with the video signal on 5.8 gigahertz. Yeah. And you get a lot of normal problems with noise and reflection and ghosting and that sort of thing. Then DJI came along and produced the digital system, which gives you an HD image at 60 or 120 frames a second. And it's stunning. In fact, in the latest release of their firmware, you get a better quality recording through the goggles, through the broadcast image than you do from the onboard camera.

Dave Jones: From storing it locally. Oh, my goodness. Oh, that's just, that is crazy. Oh, what? So they're what, using H.265 compression or something? I'm not sure.

Bruce Simpson: Probably H.264 because of this processor intensive and they're using like 20 megabits of bandwidth for the signal so they don't have to squash it up too much. But yeah, it's all adaptive. So as the signal gets weaker, they reduce the bit rate, which means they increase the amount of compression. So you get the kick.

Dave Jones: They can dynamically do that. Yeah, yeah.

Bruce Simpson: It's a two-way system.

Dave Jones: So your receiver actually transmits back and says, I'm getting a weaker signal, please reduce your bit rate. Oh, wow. Okay. That's fascinating. Wow.

Bruce Simpson: And that's what I mean about this hobby is as much electronics as it is anything else now.

Dave Jones: 20 megabits is a huge channel bandwidth. I mean, that's, yeah, that's, you know, almost broadcast quality HD. Full HD. Full HD.

Bruce Simpson: Well, in the full quality thing, it's 50 megabits.

Dave Jones: 50 megabits? Oh, jeez. I only shoot with my cameras at 28 megabits. Actually, my camera at full 4K records at 60 megabits. So, you know, that's just, oh, that's insane. Wow. Is there any issue with conflict? Like if you're at a big field meet or something and there's, you know, a thousand people flying there.

Bruce Simpson: It used to be in the old days that your radio control transmitter had a little peg on it, which represented your, your frequency because we started. You used to change the crystals. I remember that. Well, those days are gone because we're on spread spectrum 2.4 now. So by frequency hopping and distributed spread spectrum techniques, you don't have to worry about interference. But video is still, if you're running analog, of course, you've got eight channels and you can't always use two adjacent channels because you get a lot of bleed over. They're pretty crude bits of technology. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then when you've got the DJI system, it might occupy three or four of the analog channels. And you've only got, I think, to be practical, if you're operating in the same area, probably four or five digital channels you can use without interfering. And then you've got to stand because the goggles transmit, video receiver transmits. You've got to make sure that people using them are standing far enough apart that you're not going to swamp the guy next to you with your, your transmission. So there's a lot of little factors that you have to overcome, but we manage and quite often you're flying along FPV and your picture disappears because someone's plugged in next to you.

Dave Jones: Right. How many, how expensive are the crashes? Do you, how many, what's your most expensive auger in?

Bruce Simpson: Well, with the, the, the drones, the quadcopters, the racing quadcopters, they're really cheap. I think, well, yeah, yeah. You break a propeller, you might break a motor, which is like 20 bucks US worth if you're worried about, you know, if you, if you need to. But most of the time you just pick them up and fly them again. We just, they'll actually tip themselves up the right way if they're upside down and you fly off. It's, it's amazing. They crash into concrete walls and, and trees and things. That's one of the best things about it because it's kind of like having a helicopter that's indestructible. I used to fly model helicopters and every time you had a crash, it was hundreds of dollars and shafts and rotor blades and things.

Dave Jones: Right.

Bruce Simpson: These just changed the game.

Dave Jones: How difficult is the fly remote control helicopter? Is it different to flying a real helicopter? I don't know if you're a helicopter pilot, but you know, is it like, is it more difficult?

Bruce Simpson: There's no seat of the pants. That's the big problem. So you rely solely on visual cues and visual, outside visual. Yeah. Yeah. What you see. Also, you've got the orientation issue that when you move the stick to the left, the helicopter will move to its left. And if it's facing you instead of facing away from you, that's your right. Yes. So you've got to, you know, get muscle memory sorted. So it's automatic. Yeah. But simulators are a huge thing. You buy a simulator these days and learn to fly anything virtually. And then you go out. It used to be when I was training people to fly, it would take a probably five or six weeks of training before they could go solo using a buddy box system where they actually flew a model and I could take control back if they got in trouble. These days, they get on the simulator for a couple of weekends, come out and fly all by themselves. No problem.

Dave Jones: Wow. Fantastic. I've seen some, some of your most popular videos have been like a huge big MIG, MIG 25 jets and stuff like that, like 10 million views and, and stuff like that. They just look insane. Those things are, how many feet long are those things? Like 20, 30 foot long or something?

Bruce Simpson: Some of them are pretty big. I mean, I think four or five meters, perhaps some of the bigger ones. And the prices are insane. I mean, we had one there on the weekends. Getting up to close to $40,000 worth.

Dave Jones: Wow. And how many years does it take them to build?

Bruce Simpson: Well, that's the interesting thing. Most of these, apart from we've got a big English electric lightning, which was pretty much scratch built with plywood and glue and things. But a lot of the other stuff, there's a lot of manufacturers, especially in Europe, that make all the composite shells and things. And you just buy it as a sort of glue it together and throw the gear and that thing. So it only takes probably a few months of evenings to get them together.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow. Okay. And they're, and they're using jet engines, right?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. Yeah. Proper turbine engines.

Dave Jones: Right. Turbine engines. What sort of scale can you make? Like how small can you make a little turbine jet plane?

Bruce Simpson: Is it? Some of the little foam models, which are probably no more than 900 millimeters in wingspan, even less, have turbines in them. They make tiny turbines, which are fit in the palm of your hand easily.

Dave Jones: Really?

Bruce Simpson: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow. And how long can they run for?

Bruce Simpson: Well, it depends how much fuel you've got, but typically flight time is just five, six, seven minutes.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Yeah. So fairly short stuff, but.

Bruce Simpson: Yeah. Some of them go like a liter, not a liter a minute. It's a liter a minute. Some of the bigger engines.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Jeez. That's a lot. Yeah. So does the, does the, that jet engine technology scale up as it gets bigger? Like, does the technology change? Is it the same principle in a tiny one as it is for a giant one?

Bruce Simpson: Exactly the same. It's, it's all the, all the model aircraft turbines are based on a single radial inflow compressor, just like a turbocharger wheel. Cause that's what they used to use, the turbocharger compressor wheel. And then they have an annular combustion chamber and it goes out through a, a turbine, which then spins the compressor. It's a really, very simple technology, but of course the devil's in the detail getting all the tolerances right and having the inconel castings, which are very expensive to produce. So that's why you're typically paying three, four, $5,000 for a decent sized jet engine.

Dave Jones: Oh, for one engine. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Serious business. So that's a pretty big commitment to the hobby.

Bruce Simpson: Exactly.

Dave Jones: So how many people turn up to one of these field days or whatever they're called?

Bruce Simpson: With the jet meetings, we just had one the other weekend. There was probably 10 people, but we had the big one and there were probably 30 or 40 people with aircraft. And that's just New Zealand. It used to be a trans-Tasman thing, but because of COVID, no one came from Australia this year.

Dave Jones: Right. So, so do you have like a, is there an airfield devoted? Like if the council like authorised areas where this sort of stuff can happen or what's the, what's the story there?

Bruce Simpson: Well, the council doesn't know what day of the week it is, but they, they, they don't know what they're doing with the airfield. So we have permission to fly there and we just have certain rules that are laid down by the council and by civil aviation and by our national model flying authority that we follow.

Dave Jones: Okay. So it's an actual airfield. It's an actual full-size airfield. Light aircraft.

Bruce Simpson: That's one of the reasons I built my ADS-B alarm and a few other bits and pieces because at an airfield you need all the safety you can get.

Dave Jones: What's to warn you there's in current coming craft and is it just visual, you know, or do you get notified? Is there a big loudspeaker, you know, somebody's incoming or can you see them coming a mile away?

Bruce Simpson: When we first started flying there, all we had to do was have someone looking out to see if a plane was coming. Okay.

Dave Jones: So you had to have a spot. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: And I suggested at that stage, we should have an aircraft radio because they usually call up long before you see them. Yes, of course. And that wasn't a legal requirement, but I suggested that now subsequently that has become a legal requirement. And then more recently using a Raspberry Pi and an SDR, I built what I call an ADS-B alarm, which is like a radar, which basically gives you a radar map and shows you approaching aircraft. And when they get within five kilometres of the airfield below 3,000 feet. Oh, it beeps at you. It beeps at you and you know they're coming. I presented that to CAA and said, look, this is what we're doing to preserve safety. And the guy who's subsequently gone said, oh, I don't think that's a very good idea. Oh, come on. I said, why not? He says, because people will rely on that instead of using the ears and the radio. And I said, no, it's a safety, a component of the safety system. It's not replacing it. It's a backup. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jones: It's a supplement. It's a, oh my God. Oh, there's no helping. Thank goodness people like that are gone. There's no helping them. Yeah. Oh, that's nuts. Mate, well, our amp hour, our capacity is up, I'm afraid. But thank you very much for joining us, Bruce. That's all right. Next time I'll talk about my

Bruce Simpson: Parkinson's. Parkinson's. What? Yeah, mate, I've got Parkinson's, which is a whole set of challenges into itself. It's been a very, very interesting period of my life. Oh, okay. Is this a recent thing? I think a couple of years ago I was diagnosed with it now.

Dave Jones: Right. Okay. So what, I know really very little about it. Like what's the, what are the first signs and symptoms?

Bruce Simpson: Well, the first signs were a tremor. I mean, you try, it's hard enough working with surface mount components as it is. But when you, I found I just couldn't work surface mount anymore and I was having trouble doing stuff with my hands. It's quite bad shaking. So I went to the doctor and he did a few tests and said, you've got Parkinson's. And I thought, oh, okay. Yeah. So it can't be cured. All you can do is treat the symptoms. So, and with my curiosity hat on, I did a whole lot of research, read every paper I could find on it. And I've come up with a whole lot of management strategies or mitigation strategies that I've been using to quite great effect in controlling it because I, my tremors are only slightly worse than they were. And I went to the neurologist week before last, and he was quite blown away with how well I was managing given that timeframe I've been diagnosed. And so I've done things like I used to be 91 kilos. Now I'm 75 kilos. Lost some weight. I've now got, I found that creatine monohydrate.

Dave Jones: Oh yes. Creatine. That's normally for your, that's normally for your performance.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: But apparently also the brain utilizes it.

Dave Jones: Ah, yes. Yes, it does. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: And I found a study which they tested. It wasn't a very big study, but they found that it had very positive effects in, in slowing the progression of Parkinson's. So I've been taking that. Interesting. Also I've been doing, because when I asked my doctor, what should I do? Should I exercise? He said, it won't make any difference, but I did some research and thought, well, it should. If I'm going to.

Dave Jones: No, I've, I've heard that. Yeah. Exercise makes a huge difference.

Bruce Simpson: I figure if I'm going to be in decline, I want to start from a high point.

Dave Jones: Especially like excessive exercise. Cycling apparently is a big, is a, is a big thing for it. Just. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: Well, I, I walk, I try to walk six, seven, eight kilometers a day for aerobics purposes and I do resistance training and now I've got 15 inch biceps and I must have a bit stronger than I've ever been. It's quite good. The wife loves it.

Speaker ?: I bet.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a really important topic, especially for our industry where we, we work on tiny stuff. I mean, my, my eyes, you know, in the last three, four years, my eyesight has degraded to the point where I had to get glasses. You've got granny glasses too? I always prided myself on my, I got, no, no, I've just got regular ones. And yeah, I don't have the bifocal thing. I don't have any problem at a distance. It's, you know, but things in the dark. So if I don't, you know, if I'm trying to read a kid's book, even with a giant font at nighttime, like if it's, if I'm in dark, I can't read a giant one inch font because it's, you know, it's, it's just weird and those sorts of things. So yeah, they become a detriment once you get, once you get older, I'm afraid. And Parkinson's has a, would, would have an impact on, you know, assembly and cause we're all working on tiny stuff where, you know, so site and, and manual dexterity is very important in our industry. Yeah.

Bruce Simpson: And Parkinson's goes way beyond the, the tremors that most people associate with it because like sleek disruption is a huge problem. I'm lucky if I get three or four hours. Really? Yeah. Okay. It's terrible.

Dave Jones: So wow. Oh, that's bad.

Bruce Simpson: You've got the fatigue that is associated with that. So again, being fat helps immensely and fighting off that fatigue. And there's other things like you get a thing called dystonia, which is like a cramp, but it lasts 20 minutes and it can be incredibly painful. So, but again, you know, my pain threshold has gone up enormously as a result of good things in everything.

Dave Jones: Yeah, exactly. Well, anyway, thank you very much, Bruce. Where can people follow you? Cause you're, you're on the Twitters at, it's just XJet, isn't it? Yep. Yep. So XJet and you're on the, the YouTubes is XJet and your website is aardvark.co.nz.

Bruce Simpson: That's the one.

Dave Jones: Yep. That's your daily blog and rantings and you've got all sorts of stuff over there. Incredible. Longest running in the world. We'll just claim that right now. Might as well. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Absolutely. Longest running podcast. Podcast. Jeez. Blog. It was a blog before blogs existed. Blog. Yeah. Right. And it was called just a HTML website back then, wasn't it? Yeah. Brilliant. And anywhere else they can follow you? Are you on the Instagram? No, I don't do the Instagram.

Bruce Simpson: When I get my beauty blog going, I'll do the Instagram.

Dave Jones: Right. And you'll, and you'll join OnlyFans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's paid access only. Right. Okay. And that's your retirement income. Yeah. Got it. All right. Thank you very much, mate.

Bruce Simpson: No problem, Dave.

Dave Jones: All right. Excellent. Catch you next time.

Dave Jones: next time.