CH Products Throttle Quadrant

By Andrew Herd (11 March 2006)

wenty-two years ago, the only joystick I could find that would work with our home computer was so small the handle had to be held between the tip of my finger and thumb. The unit lacked any other functions at all - no fire buttons, no throttle wheel, it didn't even self center - but I paid up and was grateful, because archaic though that early joystick was, it liberated me from the keyboard. Contrast that situation with now, when PC joysticks have become so sophisticated that home builders are fitting them into real airplanes, because the leisure aircraft component industry doesn't make anything as good. The average simmer would be shocked to see how basic the engine controls are in most Pipers and Cessnas, cracked and faded plastic handled controls attached by greasy lengths of backlash-ridden cable being the rule and homebuilts being the personalised dream machines they are, their owners usually aspire to something better.

For many years, I have done all my flight simming with a CH Products three lever yoke and CH pedals without feeling the need for any more control hardware. I am on my second yoke, because the chip in the first one turned out to be incompatible with XP when that came along, but the unit is still going strong, attached to a system running Windows 98. I bought both units on the strength of reviews on this web site and my honest opinion is that although there are much fancier sets of controls around, no-one else even makes it into the same ballpark as CH Products where value for money is concerned. Yes, you can get nicer units, but they all cost several times the price. Having read various reviews extolling metal units, I was worried that being plastic, the CH units wouldn't stand hard use, but I am happy to report that isn't the case and neither the yoke nor the pedals is showing any sign of wear at all, despite daily use. One of the attractions of the yoke compared to the more expensive metal units is that it has a point of view hat, a couple of flippers to which I assign the flaps and gear, a pair of rockers which I use to move my virtual point of view around - handy for exploring virtual cabins - and a trim wheel. You try finding that feature set on a metal unit.

My CH yoke also has three levers, which did service for many years as the throttle, prop and mixture axes, an arrangement which worked fine for singles, although it created a few problems when I was testing multi-engined sims. In practice, you can get by for twins, the trick being to set up FS2004 to use automixture, assign prop control to the right hand lever, engine 2 throttle to the middle lever and engine 1 throttle to the left hand lever; but it is a pain to set up and I usually forget I have done it afterwards, with the result that the next time I fly a single, I spent a while scratching my head wondering why I have lost control of prop rpm and the mixture doesn't work anymore.

Over the years I thought seriously about buying a throttle unit, but until recently the only ones available that weren't modelled on military units were seriously expensive, although I was tempted nonetheless. But flight simulation is only a hobby and I couldn't really justify spending big money on a metal quadrant, especially when most of them were one trick ponies, designed to simulate either a twin, or a four engined heavy and not convertible in between. I got as far as making a mental note that if I did buy such a unit, I would go for a twin unit, on the basis that I could always reassign some of the levers to additional engines, although the problem remained about how to achieve symmetical throttle movements using the different shaped handles you get on paired controls. In real planes, the handles on quadrants are made that way to make sure you don't select the wrong one, and it works - well, mostly. By the same token, the reason why four engined planes have four identical handles on top of the throttle levers is so you can get your fist behind them and move them in unison, preventing one or more engines developing more power and swinging you off the runway, or whatever. Decisions, decisions.

And then came an electrifying rumor that CH Products were developing a multi-functional throttle quadrant. As an avid fan of the company's products this was music to my ears, because although their units can't be described as cheap, I have learned that they represent the best compromise around between durability and price around. In a nutshell, you get what you pay for.

The review unit did not disappoint - moulded out of thick, high impact plastic, it looks as if you could drive a truck over it and still have something recognisable left. The overall dimensions are around 8 inches wide x 5 deep x 4 thick, the six levers standing around 2 3/4 inches high of the top of the box - the distance from the outside of the leftmost handle to the outside of the rightmost handle being in the order of six inches. The front of the box is adorned with six flippers and - after a small exercise in self-assembly, the whole unit clamps securely onto the edge of the desk using a pair of tough plastic clamps. The clamps work fine as long as you have a worksurface with about an inch of free edge, but if your desktop is supported by a metal frame you may need to get creative, because the quadrant won't tighten up as securely. The USB cable is plenty long enough to do the job and I have used it plugged into a powered hub as well as directly into the back of a PC without encountering any problems.

The really clever thing about the unit, and a feature that makes it stand out head and shoulders above the competition, is that CH Products have made the lever tops interchangeable. Yep, you can pull all of 'em off and swap 'em around to your heart's content. Four black 'throttle' tops, two blue 'prop' tops, and two red 'mixture' tops are supplied, so you can set up twin, three and four engined arrangements as you will - the screenshots show a twin setup at the top and a heavy below. Each lever has a detent at about 10% forward of fully closed, which makes it a cinch to pull jet engines back to flight idle. The icing on the cake is that because Flight Simulator and the windows joystick driver let you set up the axes any way you want, you can put the throttles in the center, Boeing-style, or at one end, as you would in a twin, or however it might please you. This leads on to my only criticism of the unit, which is that the levers are only just far enough apart to allow me (I take medium gloves) to grab a fistful of four throttles without running the risk of inadvertantly moving adjacent levers, and if CH ever do a version two of this unit, my vote would be to make it at least one inch wider, but that is a counsel of perfection, I guess.

Setting the unit up is no more complicated than plugging it in and then using the Windows joystick applet to assign the axes and flippers in Control Panel - no drivers are involved. Needless to say, the unit works with both FS2002 and FS2004, so even if you haven't upgraded yet, you won't run into trouble (I would think it will work with older versions of FS too, as long as they can read data from the Windows joystick interface). The only problem you are likely to encounter is getting the range of movement set up properly on the levers; so do not forget, as I did initially, that showing Windows the full range of movement means you must pull each lever fully backwards and past the detent. I must confess that I haven't found a use for all the flippers yet, but the first thing I did was to assign one to opening and closing the cowl flaps so that I could fly MAAM-Sim's terrific DC-3 and the DreamFleet Baron.

Which are, if you wish to know, something else to fly when you have proper control of both engines. Troubled by swing on takeoff? Just advance the throttle on the swing side a little. Want to practice asymmetric flight in a twin? Just pull the mixture on one engine and you have command. Flying the four engined heavies takes on a new kind of meaning, as you can ride the throttles like a pro and fine tune the rpm to your heart's delight - and of course, stuff like realistic engine starts takes on a whole new dimension when you are freed from using the mouse to shift the levers on screen. One thing that did worry me was how I would cope flying singles, but in practice, reassigning manifold pressure, rpm and mixture to the near three levers is hardly a problem and most of the time I don't even bother to do that, leaving the quadrant set up for twins and using the first, third and fifth levers.

Do I like the CH Throttle Quadrant? You bet.