Lately altitude has been a great concern of our club. There are several ways to solve this issue. You can use on board
telemetry equipment, but it’s expensive and adds weight to the plane or use a protractor and math to solve the problem.
Estes manufactures a hand held tracking device called “Altitrak”. It’s basically a protractor with
sights and an angle recording device. It can be bought online or ordered at local hobby stores.
Here is how it works. Sight in the target like a gun and release the trigger. This will record the angle
of the target. Once you know the angle and a good estimate of how far out the target was, you can use trigonometry to calculate
the approximate height, (We won’t bore you with the math part). We have simplified the process by creating a chart and
a map of the field. All you need to do is reference the angle and distance estimate to the chart to find approximate altitude.
Hint: The distance between you and the target is called the baseline. If you are not quite sure of the distance, it’s
better to estimate the baseline low. Doing this will put any error in favor of the plane.
