RC Flight - The X-UFO Forums

FORUM.XUFO.NET start page

The beginning of a new community

The two initial discussion threads on Microheliforum and Roboternetz which had started around January 2005, kept steadily growing and becoming less and less informative from more and more newbies joining in. So sometime in May, I suggested to start a separate board focusing on the X-UFO only, and maybe other "exotic" RC aircraft. Everybody agreed but no one took action, so finally I got me some free webspace with PHP and MySQL support from FunPic and installed the PHPBB2 package on it. Within one week more than 20 users registered, most of whom I already knew from UFO discussions on the other forums.
Then "beaver" approached me, revealed his business connections to Silverlit and his plans for an X-UFO online store and offered to host my forum and turn it into the official German X-UFO support forum, which it is now. Administering this forum and dealing with the events that followed now occupy a noticeable part of my free time. Among other things, in 2005, I have been to Nuremberg three times, to test-fly an UFO before it arrived in stores, to do a demo flight for television at the Silverlit HQ, and finally to meet several other X-UFO pilots from all over Germany for some sort of a promotion day at the Tucher Sommerfest.

By August 2005, the FORUM.XUFO.NET had more than 250 users and more than 3000 posts. Several experts and enthusiasts and many simple end-users were discussing technical difficulties, "tuning" possibilities and aerial imaging techniques.

At a developer meeting in December 2006

Further developments

Two large-scale nation-wide forum member meetings in Regenstauf (well beyond 300 visitors) followed in August and November of 2005, as well as a smaller meeting in Nuremberg in May 2006. Over the winter, the original UFO developers and two of their friends created the X-3D, a highly anticipated piezo replacement module for the X-UFO's mechanical gyro sensor, featuring 3D heading-lock stabilization, which made faster flying and aerobatic maneuvers possible and generally cured many of the stock UFO's problems. The summer of 2006 then also brought development of the X-Frame series, also known as Hammer frames after the user who designed them.

Independent of the Silverlit X-UFO, also various other, larger "multicopter" type RC aircraft equipped with brushless motors have been developed by folks in the forum with mutual help, or have at least been published there. The community has become truly world-wide, with notable contributions by users from the U.S., Australia, France and Denmark, even though the majority is still based in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The german user interface of the forum appears to be a major obstacle for international visitors, but so far, I haven't come up with a good solution to this.

Currently the community is anticipating another development from the X-3D crew: the X-BL, a powerful, highly optimized brushless motor upgrade kit for the X-3D-UFO. However, Silverlit has ceased production of the X-UFO and spare parts - to free up its factory for its newer products. The X-Rotor toy helicopters "Gyrotor" and "PiccoZ", introduced in spring 2006, seem to be a lot cheaper to produce and less complex than the UFO. There have been rumours that UFO production might resume in 2008.

As of January 2007, the forum is close to having 1800 registered users and 50,000 posts, and currently has more than 10,000 pageviews and 100 postings each day. I certainly wouldn't have expected becoming the founder and groundskeeper (which, due to lack of a government or managing committee of some kind, is probably a good position) of such a large, productive and friendly community! :-D

Kindly hosted by
CONCEPTNET