Sand Shark AH-1F Cobra V2

Many are curious about my sound system so here's the story.

While there are several commercial sound systems available for purchase, I was never fully satisfied with what they offer. They mostly focus on the engine sound- turbine startup, in-flight and shutdown, IMO neglecting to accentuate the most important element, the signature air thumping sound of a helo in flight. Observe any real heli fly, almost no turbine whine is heard. The most dominant sound comes from the blade slap and the whistling caused by blade tip vortex. This is especially pronounced in two-bladed helis like the Cobra and Hueys.

So I decided to build my own system, consisting of a digital MP3 board, remote track control, an amplifier and transducer speaker. It has a volume control knob (located behind a belly hatch) that allows for static demonstration without the sound being so loud that it drowns out conversations around it. An actual digital recording of a Cobra flight was used. Turbine spool up/down time was significantly shortened for I have no patient to wait for them. Most importantly, the blade slap was edited and digitally enhanced to cut through the model's gear noises.

A sound mixer board is used to integrate sounds in real time, sound effect sources from the weapon system and an external soldier's M16 rifle. That will be told in a future story. This mixer board also provides the flexibility to adjust and balance the sound volume from each source.

An external switch turns on the 12V amplifier, a Tx switch is used to start the sound, another is used to manually switch from spool-up/flight to shutdown. In fact, I'm still editing it in an attempt to find the best version.

Since the page doesn't allow mixing image with video, I'll post the sound integration test video in the next chapter.