All right, guys, welcome to the flight test podcast. I'm Austin Fury. And I'm DJ Williams.

And here we have Steve Petrotto on the line with us. Steve, did I get your name right?

Yeah, close enough. It's one of those difficult names, so, you know, it's good. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said your name out loud, so I just kind of took a shot at it.

But Steve is the brand manager for Spectrum and the Blade Lines at Horizon. And Steve

has been working there for quite some time now. Steve, can you tell us a little bit more about

what you do there? Yeah. So, hey guys. So I am basically the guy that touches all the marketing

for both Spectrum and Blade. So my official title is Senior Brand Manager, and that just means I've been here a lot longer

than the other guys.

But I've got two guys that report to me that are associate brand managers who are kind of

up and coming and they do great work and they're learning the processes and that kind of thing.

So anything that touches the consumer's hands or eyes, basically I have a hand in.

So if it's the way a product looks and feels, if it's the way, you know, a print advertising

looks or a video looks, all those components that you see outwardly facing from Horizon for those

two brands, you know, I have a hand in in some way, shape, or form. We have a big creative team. We have, you know, a lot of people working behind the scenes. I'm just the guy that gets to be the fighter pilot when I get to show off and the rest of the people are working hard behind the scenes. So, it's a fun job. It's a lot of work but I really enjoy it, and I've been doing it here for about six years. That's awesome. Yeah, I've been doing this here at flight test for just under five years, and I don't really think there's been a time that I haven't seen you over there at Horizon doing stuff with the Blade line and with the Spectrum line. It's just great to see all the different stuff that you guys have been doing with Spectrum and with Blade. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. You know, when I first started it was for Blade, it was all helicopter. We had the MQX, if you remember that. But that was kind of like a fun acro quad. If you think about it in today's terms, it doesn't even have, didn't you have self-leveling in it. But now we've come so far with the camera drone craze and now into FPV.

And now that I get to work on Spectrum, it's a whole different ballgame with the amount of technology that that team is putting into RCU products now is unbelievable.

And obviously today, that's a pretty exciting feat for what we've actually are announcing so we're

excited so yeah you know obviously we've been getting some previews of the the stuff that you guys

been working on over the past a few weeks and in a few months and so we're really here excited to

hear about it also share it with our audience you know obviously flight test has Team Spectrum now for almost a year where we've been pretty much exclusively flying spectrum stuff. And it makes sense for a lot of what we do. A lot of the blade stuff, a lot of the great EFlight products, all that's bind and fly. And it's extremely handy for us to be able to. Makes it easy. Just bind all that stuff. But there has been some features where we've been like, man, we really wish we could have, you know, like any product, we wish we could have this, or we wish to have that, or we could add this. And so it's been really cool to see this development cycle come from Spectrum and to see all of the work you guys been putting into this product because it really, it answers a lot of questions for us of things that we've wanted to see in the product line as well um and i keep joking around that this is like pretty sure this is the first transmitter that i can actually use without asking anybody anything you know just because the uh the interface and everything we'll get into all that but tell you what steve can you give us like um can you give us just kind of like a high level preview of what the IX-12 is. We don't want to bury the lead too much here.

I'm sure that this video is actually titled IX12. So Steve, why don't you give us a little preview of what we're looking at here today? So, I mean, I'll just jump right into it. The Ix12 and I've got one in here in my hands is a year, actually over a year of development, which is longer than our, as you guys know, longer than our normal development cycle. And then also we've had 30 engineers

working on that for over a year. So put that into perspective. We've had thousands and thousands

of hours of app development time, thousands of hours of testing time.

...