... and welcome to RC Heli's
The coaxial mCX would have been easier indoors, but not practical outdoors. The CX2/3 is a handful indoors, but rather tame outdoors. So I don't think you made a bad choice, try and find somewhere BIG to fly at first and keep the tail pointed towards you to simplify the problem.
There is a fix for the tail motor popping open on youtube... 1 sec...
How to fix it:
How to stop it happening in the first place:
Also, MikeysRC on youtube has a nice series of tutorial flights on how to fly a coaxial. The principles will be the same for your single rotor, just harder
You could consider RADDs flight school:
http://www.dream-models.com/eco/flying-index.html
It is well recommended on Heli forums as one prefered method to learn to fly well. The principle is that most people start "Hop flying" to learn, like MikeysRC videos show, where you keep flights to a few seconds and build on it until you can hover nicely for longer and longer, then move to forward flight and beyond. However RADDs approach is to stay on the ground until you can keep the heli completely stable and corrected, so when you first lift off the heli starts from a perfect hover and you are well capable of controlling it.
Have fun.
PS: I am thinking of buying a bind and fly version of the mSR. I'm in two minds to move onto a non-mini single rotor, but that would seriously limit were I can fly it and I'd have to beg the local churches for hall time in the evenings before the BB or Scouts or something.
