CH Products Eclipse Yoke with 144 Programmable Functions with Control Manager Software

I have used the previous CH Products Yoke with the 3 grey colored handles for about 5 or 6 years now. I have been a licensed Private Pilot since 1978 but due to the high cost to rent a 172 over the years, got into Flight Simulator back in the days of ATP by Sublogic and still have MSFS Dos 5.0 version tucked away in the closet.My wife gave me the Saitek Yoke for Christmas this year and even though I had read the reviews about sticky movement in both pitch and roll, I had high hopes but it soon became apparent that I could no longer squeak in my landing with just tire roll, no squawk sounds on touch down. I will not go into the problems with the Saitek Yoke here but let me just say, that I do not see how anyone can do any serious flying with this product?The old CH Products still works fine but has a lot of hours on it but compared to the Saitek, it is as smooth as silk! I called and talked to Debby McDowell to see if she thought the new Eclipse was really a better built product than the previous one and she assured me that she honestly believed it to be a more robust unit with new features that she thought made it stand out from the older unit. I decided to order one and low and behold, when it arrived, I looked high and low but the mounting screws and clamps were not in the box. This did not really present a big problem but it was a let down with reference to someone in Quality Control failed to do their job. Okay, every one can have a bad day but the good news is the mounting hardware from the old one works just fine and Debbie overnighted me the missing hardware the next day after sending her a late night email.The new yoke does have a more robust feel to it and again just like the old one, it has the feel of being back in a 172. I like the new black color and the new colored handle knobs are a big plus for throttle, prop and mixture. This is a good match for the 1978 Carneado Cessna 182Q as this is my favorite aircraft for flying around the home turf in FSX. I spent 21 years as the Avionics Department Manager for Aircraft Radio Corp. ( ARC ) and have worked on just about every piece of avionics equipment you will find in this cockpit in my years as a bench tech and then later as the ARC Tech support question and answer guy.The new yoke is smooth as can be and makes the 182 fly and feel like you are in the real thing, I am still using my old CH products Rudder Pedals that have the same feel and response since new, back when we purchased the original yoke. I love the new trim wheels for pitch and roll with real detent action and a center pushbutton function in the trim wheels. The new thumb paddles are a nice addition if you get tired of holding your feet on the rudder pedals for those long cross country flights. The dual hat switches are a nice addition as well however the right hand hat switch can only be used as a four positon POV since I can not get FSX to see 2 switches closed as the same time to make it pan up and to the right for instance. You can use it to pan up, down, left and right which is okay, I am just used to it being on the right. The left switch works as a true 8 pos pov hat switch. If you download the Control Manager software, you can assign the right hand switch to be the 8 pos pov but I have not been able to do it inside FSX. FSX will not let you reassign the left switch to any other function so get used to using the left one. If you have Track IR, which I do, who cares anyway?A note about the CH manager software, if you do install it, and even if you are not using it, be warned that it takes over the calibration functions from Windows 7. I was flying the Section F8 F86 Sabre in FS 2004 and for some reason, it wanted to fly with the right wing down slightly, even with the AP engaged, it still had a problem. I took a look at the CH Yoke in devices on W7 and when I right clicked on properties, it informed me that Control Manager had control of the yoke and then I remembered from in the past when using this software, that you had to calibrate the yoke from within this software. Sure enough, when I looked at the yoke in the calibration part of Control Manager, roll was not centered. After calibrating the yoke with this software, the wing dip problem was gone and we were back to straight and level flight again.The only thing I can say that I have a question about is why did CH Products Engineers not light the center bottom pushbutton switch? The left and right ones glow red but the middle button is dark? I wonder who won the battle and why on this one? It could not have been Engineering since we do not make mistakes, so it must have been a Sales call? This is who we are taught to blame when you are an Engineer, oh well, no big deal but a pretty Blue light would have looked nice here! Hey Engineering, you can always do an Engineering Change Order as a product improvement, I have seen many of these pass over my desk when with ( ARC ), there were only 24 mods issued to the ARC 400B autopilot system over the years and only a couple might have been mandatory with the rest being passed off as Product Improvements, give me a break here!In the end, if you want the smoothest yoke you can get for the money with a lot of really nice features that really add to the realistic aspect of flight then this is the yoke to buy. No push thru annoying detents or sticking problems of any kind. Okay Okay, my Saitek yoke is just totally unuseable for my flying but I am not totally against this company, Their throttle quadrant works well and I had to buy a USB version to stick beside the Eclipse Yoke. I also have the Radio control panel, Autopilot control panel and Switch Panel along with a Buttkicker on my High backed leather office chair all hooked up to a i7 950 oc to 3.806 GHZ on liquid cooling and a EVGA GTX 285 in the X16 slot hooked to one 22 inch Acer Lcd and a 17 inch Lcd for the GPS display. The other 22 inch Acer monitor is tied to a MSI 9800GT card in the X8 slot on the EVGA X58 SLI Le mother board. I have found that this setup gives the best stutter free video when low and lots of ground based scenery from UTX with spot plane mode on the 2nd 22 incher and Virtual cockpit mode on the other Acer connected to the GTX 285. This is not a SLI setup since FSX does not benefit from the SLI Bridge but it does work better with 2 video cards and each of them tied to separate monitors. This does not seem to load the Dual head from the GTX 285 as bad and the PCIE bus still has the bandwith to drive both video cards with out being saturated. I threw in the 17 incher for the gps since it was sitting here doing nothing and the GTX 285 likes this a lot better than dual 22 inchers. Okay I got off the subject. But with all of this stuff and CH Products for the main controls and you have your self a heck of a simulator. It did not all happen over night but we are there! It just keeps slowly getting a little better but at the same time, I am getting older as well. I guess it is good to have your hobbie almost there at around the same time your body starts giving you the can't do what we used to do stuff. I also have been a Ham Radio Operator since the age of 18, some 34 years now. Time really flys when you are having fun! Okay we are done and done now! Please forgive me for any typing or spelling errors, my fingers do not do what I am thinking some of the time and I am a Engineer type not a English Major? College was years ago!

I had this yoke since 2016, recently upgraded to Yoko by Virtual-Fly. I also had some limited experience with Saitek and RedBird yokes.Let me start by saying that there are multiple levels in flight simulation controls. The lowest level is a control which is sufficiently robust to last, and has adequate functions to control a plane in a simulator. This yoke perfectly fits into this category. The next level up is realism - yokes that look like real thing and feel like real thing (yoke in a plane). Those are niche products which are priced between $700 and $1300 for "regular" yokes with range of movements and resistance similar to those on a plane, and to over $2,000 for force feedback yokes. Most of them are almost made to order and sold directly by manufacturers.This yoke is a relatively low end flight control, and yet it is a good buy for the money. It is a great starter option because it has so many things integrated into it: tons of buttons which you can use for different functions in your simulator, throttle / Mixture ./ Prop quandrants, even some sort of rudder pedals. It has hat switches which can be used to change views in a simulator.Its range of travel in all directions is less than on a real airplane, and resistance is also less. This makes it less realistic, but more suitable for kids. And yet, it has some resistance, it has no dead zones, and it is smooth through its entire range. In this sense, considering that yokes may cost up to several thousands of dollars, it is a really good value and it is a perfectly adequate set of controls which may last you and which you only may want to upgrade if you get deeper into flying or flight simulations.It is a simple USB device, connected to computer with a single USB cable. X-plane 11 recognizes it instantly as "CH Eclipse yoke". No drivers are needed. If you use a very old program, like Microsoft Flight Simulator that was written before the invention of "plug and play", it will not recognize the yoke and you will have to download CH manager from the CH web site. It is a little bit of a pain to install and configure, but not "rocket science" either.It has clamps to attach it to the desk, but the problem is that standard IKEA-type desks with thickness of around 30 mm (inch and a quarter) are too thick for the clamps. They clamp nicely on 3/4" plywood. The range limit is somewhere in between, maybe around an inch or so. When we got it, we could not attach it to the desk. I ended up using a piece of plywood, drilled two large diameter holes in it, attached it to the desk with C-clamps, and attached the yoke to this piece of plywood. Once attached, it stays put. It takes about 30 seconds to attach it or to remove it.When you start using it, after the first several weeks or months, the first thing which you probably will find not adequate are that you cannot really use those little levers next to the center of the yoke as substitutes for rudder pedals. Those little levers, even though they can be programmed as rudders and probably were added for this very reason, are awkward to use. You will want real rudder pedals quite soon; but it is great that you have at least something to use as substitute for the first time. The second thing which will eventually start annoy you is this tiny throttle quadrant. You may want a larger size quadrant of Cessna-style vernier throttles. They could be the next upgrade. And then eventually you will want a better yoke. But overall, it is a good start - you can start flying with just this gadget alone.It is all plastic, but the quality is surprisingly decent. We (well, mostly my kid) were using it for almost two years, and it shows no signs of tear or wear. In the price around $200, it is the most logical buy. Logitech / Saitek yoke feels similar (perhaps a little better) but does not have all those buttons (not even the throttle). Lower end CH yoke is just lower end, you lose more than you gain in price. There is really no other options unless you are ready to go up to $700+.In my review of CH pedals, I rated them three starts because they are much worse than Saitek / Logitech pedals, but this yoke is quite decent for the money, so I gave it four stars. Why not five? Because it feels and looks too different from a real thing.