When I first saw the CH Pro Throttle I was impressed. It has a very streamlined and cool look about it, and something almost intuitive about the layout of the controls.

With four four-way hat switches and four single buttons, the Pro allows up to twenty functions to be assigned. Furthermore, the Pro will allow up to twenty more functions to be assigned to a standard joystick attached to it. Not too shabby!

The beauty of CH Products is ease of programmability, and the Pro Throttle is a great example of ease of use. True, its not quite as flexible as TM gear, but the learning curve is not nearly as steep. If you intend to create your own custom configurations, almost a must these days with the all but useless ones released with sims, you will WANT a programmable HOTAS.

Unfortunately, there is no printed manual with the Pro Throttle. Yikes! Hard to believe that CH is cutting corners this way, but at least the on line manual seems fairly complete.

The Pro is almost identical to the regular throttle. The difference is that the Pro has extra hats where the regular throttle has buttons. Unlike the pivoting action of the TM throttle, the action is a slider. The Pro also lacks detentes for full power and afterburner. Perhaps this is a niggling point, but since I was accustomed to TM gear I noticed the difference.

Click to continue . . .

One of the beauties of these programmable sticks is that they can be made to work in digital mode. That is, if the sim or game does not support a throttle, you can tell the throttle to output keystrokes to tell your sim to increase speed, etc. I used the Pro with the CH Force FX and CH pedals in Fighter Duel, Janes Longbow and in Comanche 3.

No feedback in Longbow or C3, but this combo was VERY nice to use in FD. Of course, you can also use the Pro with any 2 or 4 button stick on the market, but used in conjunction with a CH Combatstick or Fighterstick, you gain extra programming capacity.