I got my piccolo when it first came out, in December of 1999. The helicopter itself was a Christmas gift from my mother (thanks mom!) and the piccoboard was a gift from my father (thanks dad!). I put it together on Christmas Eve in about 5 hours, but had to wait for the piccoboard as they were hard to come by at the time. Many thanks to Andy at www.aerohobbies.com for getting me one when nobody else had any, I recommend his shop to anybody who is looking for piccolo stuff, I got my charger, batteries, piccoboard, and servos from him and he shipped it very promptly, took my order right over the phone and was very helpful. After installing the piccoboard and everything I went to my uncle's house and tried to fly for the first time. I had never flown a helicopter and was only just beginning to learn to fly rc airplanes, so needless to say it was quite a challenge. Luckily my uncle had a video camera handy and I have my first steps on film, which is really neat to see just how much I have progressed. I spent the entire weekend learning with my piccolo in his basement, probably getting around 16 hours total of trying to tame the beast. It's quite amazing to see just how far I came in only one weekend, check out the video section as I plan on posting everything I can there for all to see. In any event, I was having major glitching problems with my helicopter depending on where I flew it and didn't really know why, so I just tried flying it the way it was. It turns out that my transmitter (and old futaba that belongs to my rc plane) was on AM and obviously the Rx on the piccolo is FM. I'm amazed it even worked at all, but it did and got me through my humble beginnings. After picking up a brand new Futaba skysport 4 off of ebay.com, the glitching was completely gone and my worries were over mechanically. I had numerous crashes and every time the piccolo seemed to defy the laws of physics by not breaking, until one fateful afternoon when I was flying in my kitchen. I try to videotape my sessions so I can see how I am doing and keep a good video log of it, and I happened to catch most of the crash on film, and have that incident available in my videos section for all to see. In any event, after gluing it back together and flying it a few more times, it just kept breaking until I bit the bullet and ordered replacement skids, struts, and main frame from horizonhobby.com, total cost of repair, $42! To date that is all I've spent on this little wonder and I've been flying it for over a year now, and THAT is amazing I think. At this point I am able to hover my machine under complete control and am working my way to the goal of nose in hover. My piccolo is completely stock right now to keep with the spirit of learning to fly, but once I have mastered it completely I intend to make it the best flying machine that it can be.