Understanding the "Dead Zone"

[Simaril]

My joystick (X45) seems too sensitive to fine controls near the center, but I'm not clear on how best to fix this in AH2.

There seem to be 2 areas to try: one is the "joystick settings" area where you can use sloder bars to affect input in each 10% sequential controller movement; the other is with the "Dead Band" and "damping" slider bars.

How are these areas different?

[DamnedRen]

DEAD BAND stops spiking. This is normally used to fix spikes from old, dirty or just plain worn out potentiometers (pots). You can easily tell if your stick suffers from it by going to settings and looking at the blue boxes. If the line "jumps", when you move your stick, throttle or rudders,  like someone got shocked while on an EKG machine then your pots are spiking. You can sometimes move past the spiking point by sliding the slider up and give yourself a temporary fix.

DAMPING delays your stick input to the control surfaces. It may be as little as a millisecond if you have the slider near the bottom to what seems like an eternity if you move the slider to the top. We used to get a message stating, "don't move your controls so rapidly" followed by a few second full lock up. Moving the slider bar up a little stop the message by delaying your yanking on the stick. The more you slide it up the more you delay the movement of the control surfaces. I'd suggest you mess with this one and see what happens.

Contrary to what some believe, the default settings for pitch, roll and yaw have the zero (0) slider setting up from the bottom. This will also increase center twiches.

[Ghosth]

Deadzone is exactly what it says it is.

Its the dead zone in the center of your stick. What it really does is set where the computer starts activity when you move the stick. If you set the deadzone to the top, your going to be pulling the stick a long ways back before you start
moving your elevators. If you have it to low you'll typically see the plane leave autopilot mode just by breathing on the stick. Happy medium is what your looking for.

So yes it can be used as Ren stated above. It can be used to tone down sticks that are very sensitive in the center also.

The key is to start small, make small rotating "swirls" with the least possible amount of force. So that the stick stays in the "slop" in the center.

If you see little spikes show up in the graph while doing this, your deadband is set too low. Don't forget to adjust both roll & pitch.

As to being very sensitive near the center, that you can adjust with the 10 sliders on the left hand side.

Make sure slider  0 is fully to the bottom.

Then instead of doing a straight stairstep from low left to high right.
Put in a low curve instead.

so that the first 5 siders are BELOW where the straight line is. Then step up fast with the last 5 to get to the top.

Roll typically can be set straighter than pitch.

[Max]

Originally posted by Ghosth

Then instead of doing a straight stairstep from low left to high right.
Put in a low curve instead.

so that the first 5 siders are BELOW where the straight line is. Then step up fast with the last 5 to get to the top.

Roll typically can be set straighter than pitch.

What 'STRAIGHT' line are you referring to Ghosth?

DmdMax

[stantond]

Deadzone is intended to eliminate unwanted stick inputs when the stick is centered.  Dampening is a decrease (slowing) of stick inputs relative to the speed (quickness) of stick movement.  A high amount of dampening will make the plane slow to stick inputs, which may help gunnery but maneuverablity will suffer.

A small deadzone is desired.   One way to set a minimum deadzone is to go offline, set the plane on level autopilot and see if autopilot holds.  If not, increase deadzone until it does.  Myself, I set deadzone so nose bounce is minimized and autopilot works reliably.

Stick scaling (what Ghosth is referring to) has more of an influence on reducing stick input than dampening.  Scaling your stick is a matter of preference.  Some prefer no scaling, while others do.  The main scaling benefit I have found is from elevator pitch stick scaling  to enable a closer 'riding the edge' of blackouts.   Stick scaling will reduce the sensitivity to fine controls near the center.


Regards,

Malta

[fuzeman]

Ghosth is referring to the 'imaginary line' you see when you connect the sliders on the left, so to speak.
You can also see this represented in the lower of the two blue graphs at right.
I line would be a linear response no matter how sensative and a curve would give a variable response depending on slider position.

[Ghosth]

Dmax, if you look at the default slider setup, from low left to high right it stairsteps in a "straight" line. Yes its at an angle, sorry, was tired & should have used better terminoligy.

What I was suggesting was that if you took that imaginary line, from low left up to high right and gave it some slack. Now it "sags, and  forms a curve.  The curve hugs the bottom at first then rises fast to meet the top at the right.

This still gives you 100% max possible deflection, but you have to pull the stick all the way back to get it. It gives you MUCH more precise control closer to the center.

BTW you only want to do this for pitch.
You can leave roll alone, or even scale it up a bit.

Finding the right amount of deadband, and getting the sliders set right for you and your stick can make a huge difference.

Especially in gunnery and stall fighting.

[Ohio43]

Good luck in setting the rudder inputs correctly on the X-45.  I have two X-45's and they are way too sensitive..even after playing with the sensitivity settings.  Suggest you get rudder pedals if you also have this problem.   Rudder was such a pain that I repaired my good old MS sidewinder and am using that.

[OOZ662]

Heck, I've got a great setup for my X45's rudder. Want me to post my stick config file?