 Welcome to Rotor Riot. I'm Joshua Bardwell, and I'm here with Alex Vanover. We've snuck upstairs because I want to talk about rates. You've been saying some really interesting things about rates. I've been having some interesting conversations with people on the internet who ask me questions about their rates. And I've come to the conclusion that most people would fly better if they changed their rates. You know, I absolutely agree with you. I think most people personally have way too high rates or sometimes they don't have enough rate. It just really depends, but how do you know? So, here's what we're going to talk about. I've got an outline in my head for this episode. We're going to talk about, first of all, briefly what our rates are. A lot of people know what rates are, but just in case. Then we're going to talk about how to know if your rates are too high and you probably should lower them. And then how to know if your rates are too low, although most of your rates are too high. Rates are, when you deflect the stick on the transmitter, how fast does the quad spin? Exactly. So basically, you know, how fast does it roll? How fast does it flip and how fast does it yaw? 360 degrees per second. That's one turn per second. And if you think about it, that means if you did full stick deflection and you tried to do a roll, it would take you one second to complete that roll. Which sounds fast, but it's really not. But in quadcopters, it's really, really not. In an airplane, that'd be considered really fast, but not with a quadcopter. That'd be really slow like this. When you deflect the stick all the way, how fast does your quad go? Now, a lot of freestyle pilots like high rates. They like snappy, flippy floppies. They think that they're going to be better pilots because they have high snappy rates. They want to emulate guys like, like I remember a long time ago, Steele put out his rates and they're pretty fast. I don't remember exactly. I don't remember exactly what they were. They were over a thousand degrees a second. And back then, that was when the Rubik's Cube maneuver was where you do half-front flip quick roll and half-front flip. That was what people thought you had to have to do those maneuvers. They were like over a thousand degrees a second. Everyone wanted to roll their quadcopter really fast. At the time, and still to this day, a lot of people believe that that's the way to go for freestyle. What's the problem with rates that are too high? The problem with high rates is the quadcopter is really, really hard to make fine movements with, especially depending on the curve of your rates. So if your rates are really, really high, what can end up happening is let's say you're trying to do just a clean roll and exit like that. If your rates are really high and you do the roll too fast, you're going to exit like this. Or you're going to be really jerky and not very smooth and precise at center stick because your rate curve is so much higher. Right. There's two problems with excessively high rates. Number one is like you said, if you're going to try and do like a snap 180 or a 360 precisely, it's going to spin so fast. You can do it. It takes a lot of practice to get the muscle memory timing exactly right. But a lot of people don't put in that time and you're in precise. You also lose control and precision when you're making fine movements because you have to make these tiny little stick movements to get to otherwise the quad is too abrupt and you can't move very precisely. And that's exactly why when we say that let's say your rates are 1,000 degrees a second, that's 1,000 degrees at full stick. So if you're just trying to make fine little movements on the insider stick, you're working with a lot less resolution than let's say if your max stick with 700 degrees a second, then that increases the resolution and your ability to fly smoother at center stick. That's just some of the disadvantages of high rates. You can't necessarily be as smooth at practice but there are some also advantages to having high rates. What are some advantages of high rates? Let's pretend you're trying to hit a gap, like a V-gap in a tree and you're trying to do a roll or flip a Rubik's cube if you're like someone like Steele. High rates will allow you to do that maneuver and exit a lot quicker if you can do it precisely than slow rates. That's an advantage of having the higher rate. So we can say that there's a trade-off between the speed that the move occurs and the harder it will be to do it precisely. Most people set their rates high because they see these extra snappy flippy moves but they're too high for most people to do them precisely. I first experienced this when I was at a race and I talked to, I guess it was probably Evan Turner and he said lower your rates down to like 300-400 degrees per second. For the first five or six packs, I hated it because I'm having to make these giant stick movements but then suddenly my laps were weight. When you have to make that mid-turn correction because you're swinging wide with high rates you can't do it with low rates. You can really smoothly do it and it helped a lot. So yeah, I guess we're going to talk about low rates then and personally I prefer lower rates in general for flying mainly because I'm a racing pilot and as you said with people, the way I learned to fly low rates is I used to fly 1,000 degrees a second like Steele did at the first national that I won. I was flying 1,000 degrees a second with Zero Expo. That's what I raced with. But we're in a new time era. I go to Korea and I see Mincheon and I see people like Evan. They're racing 300-400 degrees a second. I'm like, how do you do that? Because I tried it and I didn't like it. But what I ended up finding is they were able to be a lot more precise because they had a lot more resolution to work with. And usually in racing you're always just a little bit nervous. In the quad, nearly as much as high rates are. You've got a little shaky hands. Lower rates help smooth that out. In racing, the only time that low rates can't hurt you is if you're joining a quick maneuver like a slalom. If you're at high speed, the faster you go the faster the quad needs to be able to roll. But we're still not really at a point in racing where 400 degrees a second can't do that but I think we might be getting close to it. But low rates are really nice. You've got a lot more resolution to work with. Let's talk about how you know when your rates are too high because I have an idea about this one. I think you have an idea about how to know when they're too low. Your rates are too high if when during your normal flying you never go to full stick deflection. And I was surprised when I looked at some of my black box videos with the stick overlay that even when I thought I was doing like a full stick snap, I wasn't because the quad was moving so fast that my brain just went, that's enough. So if you never pay attention when you fly and if you never feel yourself hitting full deflection on your flips and rolls lower your rates. You're wasting stick travel. You're wasting resolution. A reason to know if your rates are too low is we are just out freestyling today. But I was trying to do these maneuvers where I go backwards and I'm right above the ground and that's the goal is to be just as low to the ground as possible and I do a roll and then I do another roll. I don't know really what to call it but long story short I would do it and as you'll see in the video in instance where you would not necessarily need to bump up your rates from like I'm freestyling at 450 degrees a second may bump that top and curve up to like by 50 or just bump it up just enough to where you're hitting full stick if you're hitting full stick I guess we could say and the quad isn't moving fast enough then you need more. You've actually talked about how you tweak your race rates a little bit depending on the course some courses might need like a split s and some might not. Yeah exactly so for example when I went to nationals I know real fast maneuvers where you need to to roll the quad really fast whereas a lot of tracks where there's small I end up increasing my rates because I need to be able to do the turns quick enough so when I get to race I usually when I fly the track I'll feel out do I really need that much rate and sometimes I'm literally on race day of three racing and I'm like I just need a little bit more rate and I only make changes by about 2% just a little bit because you know you don't want to overdo it and risk having a crash just a little bit and sometimes a little bit in order to get the rates to be faster but anyway yeah in racing especially I think that changing the rates is okay also flying something you're used to but yeah we prefer lower rates I think a lot of people flying with higher and I've experienced this I've been working my rates down I used to fly at about 1100 degrees per second and I've been working them down I'm now closer to 900 degrees per second and at first you think I'm going to lose that snap but what ends up happening is you were going 900 degrees per second anyway but now you're actually fully deflecting the stick and you gain back so much precision in the center the ability to do smooth sweeping turns with precision it really helps a lot you freestyle with 700 degrees or 750? No I actually my roll rate is 450 degrees a second on roll all yeah it's 450 my pitch is 280 and my y'all is about a 1 I've raised a little bit it's about 180 degrees that's basically what I race at is around 400 on roll and I've bumped it up a little bit for freestyle and all my videos in the last three months we're about since December of 2018 have been with about those rates and you can see when you do some of those even Rubik's cubes they're a little bit slower but they almost look it's like a different look on the maneuver because you have to be really smooth and you know it's also easier for a pilot like me because you know I'm a racing pilot and a freestyle pilot to be able to transition back and forth which is partially why I keep the rates lower but I'm starting to hit a point now where I want to raise not necessarily my overall rates but just my roll rate and that's one more thing I want to touch on is most of the maneuvers we do on quads are pitch and roll and I think roll is even more important so it's not necessarily important to have all your rates exactly the same oh no I agree in fact I prefer to have my y'all rate a little bit lower my y'all rate is typically around 800 degrees per second whereas I have my pitch and roll rate around 1100 and the reason for that is that I find that my throttle control is less precise when the stick is deflected and I'm kind of doing two things at once so I usually keep my y'all rate a little lower so I never have to like fully deflect y'all and be like doing that usually the typical thing is your rates are way too high it's insidious because you don't you think no I can hit gaps you don't notice how much precision you're losing until you so here's what I would say as a recommendation if you're a freestyle pilot and you're at over say 1000 degrees per second take it down to at least 1000 even 900 probably not you may be lower but that's a good middle round to be in see if your snap rolls and stuff still look perfectly snappy but and especially if you haven't put in a lot of time to develop the muscle memory if you're at 1300 degrees per second and you've got the muscle memory perfect so you can Rubik's Cube hey more power to you but if you're just a beginner especially an intermediate pilot and you're just copying somebody's rates they may be too fast yeah this is more intended towards beginner media and even some pilots who are advanced pilots and just haven't figured out the rates I mean world I'm always changing my rates I've come from 1000 degrees a second to 300 back to 600 I'm settling about 400 right now you know it's there's nothing that's going to stop you from changing rates it's just fun to go experiment with and in beta flight and in flight one you can just create a new rate profile and what I do is when I'm testing rates is I put it on a switch yeah so I just I'll do a pack and then I'll switch it or in some times I'll forget I'll even have someone set it to where I don't know what's what and I just fly it out and you can figure out pretty quickly yeah but that's a really good way to kind of you know you have the bias you like oh this is high rates it's going to feel waifed too fast and everything like that personally my opinion is you don't need more than 750 degrees a second to do almost any fbv freestyle maneuver except for maybe 1% of high precision through gap maneuvers and honestly most people don't really want to watch those they happen so fast anyway yeah that it just it looks like something out of this world so what about a recommendation for racers you know maybe beginner or intermediate racers what kind of rates would you suggest they target if you're coming from freestyle target around 600 degrees a second that's going to be a good starting point that's what I raised that for most of 2017 and 2018 and if you're a racer who's struggling to figure out their rates personally I've helped a lot of local pilots just by lowering their rates or sometimes even they were too low and I increase them a little bit and I've seen their times drastically get better on a track like you were talking about earlier if you're a pro pilot or an intermediate pilot trying to get better at racing I would recommend around 500 degrees a second I know that's what people like Minshan and Evan like I like a little bit lower rates but anywhere in there you can start playing with the rate curse 500 to 600 is a good starting point and if you're interested to know what some of these guys rates are I know Minshan Evan and I's rates are in flight one I know Evan and Minshan have also posted their beta flight rates publicly on their channel so you can see in my rates you know you can just select them and configure it or so the last thing I would say is that when you first make these changes you're probably going to hate it because it's not what you're used to it's going to feel really unnatural I found that it was only when I started trying to do these kind of precision maneuvers that it really came out you know so don't don't just try one pack go I hate it and quit everybody I have talked to I've done workshops and stuff where the guys are like what could I do to fly better and every single one of them I turned their rates down and at the end of the workshop they all thought they were better pilots as a result even in racing I've noticed the same thing I think that people could be much better pilots in general if you adjust your rates some people don't like to change your steps they don't like to dive into that stuff but if you're a pilot who's been flying for some bit of time now and you really haven't found the rates that suit you and you just kind of learn to adapt to something go ahead and try different rates it's not going to hurt you put some time into it at least 5-10 batteries is what it takes for me usually to start to liking something or maybe not liking something but give it a try because it can drastically help your flying Alex thank you very much for being here thank you Josh for having me on your little talk here I've appreciated this guys thank you so much for watching this episode of Rotariate be sure to like the video comment down below which what your rates are do you think that higher lower rates are better if you try if as a result of this video you try different rates and you like them or if you hate them let us know thank you so much watching and we'll see you in the next one