Jaycar RC Helicopters.

Take to the skies and earn your wings dogfighting with the blowies.

IT'S summer, and here at Bleeding Edge, our thoughts have been turning, as usual, to Mindless Entertainment (ME).

We generally find that during the drinks breaks, at lunch and tea and after stumps, our electrically excitable neurons have to be anaesthetised with novel engagement.

That generally leads us to the Jaycar Electronics catalogue, a publication that in 30 years of serving the hobby electronics community, has grown to 508 pages.

We've never met Gary Johnston, who founded the Jaycar chain (formerly John Carr & Co Pty Ltd) when he left Dick Smith Electronics in 1981, but we're pretty sure we would recognise his neurons.

In addition to the soldering irons, multimeters, oscilloscopes, vernier calipers and wire type K thermocouples with twin banana plugs that are essential tools for us nerds - to say nothing of the potentially life-saving equipment such as solar-powered LED bicycle tail-lights and wireless 2.4GHz rear-view mirror reversing cameras - Gary's catalogues can always be relied upon for supplies of ME instruments. There was that fly-swatter pistol, for instance, that didn't so much kill blowflies as terrify them - we're not particularly good shots at Bleeding Edge.

This summer the blowflies are even more terrified, as we've acquired a small fleet of remote-controlled indoor miniature helicopters for our amusement.

They have been rotoring off Jaycar's and its competitors' shelves and, subsequently, off the floors of the nation's sheds and living rooms in the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands. May we suggest that if you happen to wander into any unfamiliar space and hear a whirring noise, prepare to duck.

Defying gravity with a miniature helicopter can be a uniquely frustrating activity. While these indoor models have a gyroscopic blade that makes them easier to fly than single-rotor models, they do require an ability to develop new skills.

One needs to trim the machine and slowly adjust to its particular flight characteristics and the sensitivities of the controls. It's difficult to win one's miniature helicopter wings if your aircraft isn't relatively stable.

There are vast squadrons of no-name brands and fakes that have such sensitive controls it's virtually impossible either to get them into the air or avoid them falling out of it.

But there can be a certain amount of perverse fun in having the machine suddenly assume the aeronautic characteristics of a rock or career wildly into a wall.

Like those cheap Android phones that even Telstra and Optus are selling for less than $100, these things are a waste of time, money and materials and probably should be banned.

The problems with the phones arise from the fact they have small seven-centimetre resistive touchscreens and Android was not designed for resistive screens.

Our advice, if you're interested in a touchscreen phone, is to spend a little more for a model that has at least an eight-centimetre capacitive screen.

With miniature helicopters, the trick is to find a reputable brand and a dealer who has a good reputation, which is why we prefer an operation such as Jaycar to eBay merchants.

The biggest seller at Jaycar is the GT-3310, an all-aluminium model that, at $39.95, is a relatively inexpensive source of ME.

The GT-3460 allows you to attach an infra-red dongle to your iPhone or Android smartphone and use a free downloadable app to control its motion.

Another excellent choice is the Syma S107, which isn't stocked by Jaycar but is widely available elsewhere.

While our ambition is to graduate to the GT-3490, a single-blade model that can withstand a minimal amount of wind and might survive the occasional outdoor flight, we expect by next year we'll be looking for another source of ME.

If Jaycar happens to be reading this, we wouldn't mind trying a remote-controlled blowfly.