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It's true!

You can either e-mail your information from the post-box at the foot of this page or use the Response Form below - and if you've got a picture of yourself, so much the better!

Gary lives in the UK, near Cambridge. He is 34 years of age, married with three young children and a golden retriever. He is a modeller and also webmaster of www.northwealdmodels.co.uk - the web site of Epping and North Wield Model Flying Club which is featured on club scene.

Gary is also a full-size pilot (the planes I mean, of course; I don't know anything about Gary's vital statistics!) - he used to own a Pitts S2-B and competed in national aerobatic competition for a few years. He was a city bond trader for 13 years (that's how he afforded the Pitts, he says), but unfortunately he lost his job in a corporate take-over three years ago and he now 'scratches a living from the internet' through his own internet hosting company http://www.angryrhino.net

Gary is also the owner of a unique website called RC Pages - an entirely free classified ads site for modellers worldwide. I visited this site and thought the concept absolutely brilliant! The emphasis here is on the "worldwide". Gary initially decided to create the site mainly so that modellers from all around the world can quickly and easily see how much money others are paying for the SAME GOODS in other parts of the world. 

It all started at the end of last year when Gary decided to purchase a Multiplex Profi MC4000 set of radio gear. The UK price  was £949 (including tax). Gary considered that this was far too much so he took a look on the web and eventually bought the EXACT same set from a German model shop via mail order and paid £640 (including tax, insurance and shipping).

It was then that Gary decided to create a global site for modellers to trade their stuff. He says some people have commented that the concept is no good because of the cost of international shipping but they are missing the point. The real intention is for Americans to deal with Americans, Australians with Australians etc, etc. The nice thing, though, is that everyone can see what everyone else is up to. There are many other classified ads systems on the net but because they tend to list the ads in long columns, they have to all be split up into different pages and web sites. Because RC Pages uses a database and a search facility to store and display the ads, this problem is done away with.

This is all helped by the fact that Gary owns his own internet hosting company http://www.angryrhino.net and so he has the necessary commercial web space available. He does the programming for the site during the gaps in his working days and we get the benefit of a professional database driven site that would otherwise be too expensive a project to undertake without requiring some sort of subscription. If you click on this thumbnail, you can see a slightly reduced reproduction of RC Pages homepage and read exactly how the system works.

Final thoughts from Gary: I think that sometimes people tend to be suspicious of anything that is offered free and this is a real shame. I get a real big kick out of seeing rcpages grow, and receiving kind comments from users of the site. My motivation for the site is firstly altruistic - there are banner ads on the site - but none are paid for. If eventually I can attract some paying model-related banner ads then that will possibly start to cover a tiny part of the many hundreds of hours of work and sweat that have gone into this site (and the cost of the bandwidth and other server resources) - but I'm not holding my breath on that score.

Check it out for yourself - go to http://www.rcpages.com 

Join in the fun, send ModelFlight an e-mail and tell us about yourself, your family, hobbies and interests, what you do for a living, how long you've been model-making, what club you belong to, etc. - in fact as much or as little as you see fit. Include a picture of yourself if you can.  

Your e-mail address will be shown unless you specifically ask for it not to appear. Picture files ideally need to be in JPG format for best colour reproduction and to minimise time on-line.

If you want to send me pictures by conventional mail, my address is

Reg Heath, 60 South View Gardens, Andover, Hants, SP10 2AQ, UK

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