I'm not impressed. I must be the first person in history to say this! I've never heard a single dissatisfied review of t he CH-Yoke, but I may be the first person to do so! If some of these issues you guys believe to be related to settings (which I highly suspect they are) then by all means speak up 😀 .
So my first flight was about a 2+ hour VFR trip in the area north of SFO. I flew and landed in all weather conditions and in all types of terrain along the way in my trusty maule, hoping to get a good feel for how the CH-Yoke works. After finally figuring out how I wanted to customize all the buttons, I was on my way!
The first thing I noticed is the need to constantly trim the yoke itself for all stages of flight. If you have the built in wheel set full down, takeoff is nearly impossible, and even at a middle-ground its still difficult. That should never be said about a maule, since it can takeoff in a mere 300 feet of runway! Once you reach cruise altitude, the main wheel needs to be trimmed again before you can use any "fine" trimming with the rocker switches. Landing was where I truly found the trim issue to be difficult. In order to land the taildragger, I had to lean fairly far back on the yoke my first try before I realized it had to be trimmed once again! Although I did get used to the double trim idea, and was fairly comfortable with it by my 3rd landing.
Second, I noticed that as opposed to the fine control you have over the aircraft as with a joystick, you can only make slightly more dramatic changes with the yoke. That I remedied fairly quickly by lowering the null zones, but the rod itself the yoke sits on is slightly too stiff for my taste.
When making turns, I've found it very hard to keep the pitch from banking past the bank-limit (the plane seems to want to turn itself), and when coming out of banks I usually have to apply excessive control input in the opposite direction to overcome this. My vertical speed control in turns is also completly unstable.
I also miss the force feedback from my MS ffb2 joystick. When approaching the ground it now seems a mystery to me as to how high I am. With the FFB, I was able to feel a change in the aircraft the closer I was, and my hand was the first to know when the wheels touched down! It also made turbulence much more interesting.
Everyone also says that it really immerses you in the sim, but it actually takes me away from it. I now have to sit much farther from my desk (since I need room to operate the yoke comfortably), and my monitor is now about 8 - 12 inches further back on the desk than it used to be, a combined 1-2 ft away from what i'm used to. The yoke rod actually extends for about 5-6 inches beyond the casing when fully pushed in, so it needs that slight extra buffer there. Not to mention I fly with a laptop, so the keyboard now becomes somewhat of a chore to reach, also making me realize how much I'm not actually in the simulator.
I do enjoy having some extra degree of fluid control I experience with this when flying heavies, but for the issues with banking I expressed, it makes it almost not worth it.
Short of these opinions not changing in the testing / sensitivity tweeking I'll be up to in the next few days, I may be one of the first to actually return a CH-Yoke!
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so make sure it's not doing that with yours.
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