What could I do to record the height of a homemade rocket?

Question

OK lets say I made a homemade rocket and wanted to see how far it went up. What could I do? Would I get one of those RC flight data recorder things or am I not understanding what a flight data recorder does?

Answer 1

buy a small altimeter which measures max altitude.

Answer 2

Walk back say 20 feet from the launch pad, and when you shoot the rocket, measure the angle that it makes with the ground. (So from the point 20 feet back from the launch pad to the highest point of the rocket's path, imagine a line that intersects the ground.) Measure the angle, and use the law of cosine or sine, whichever it is (or maybe tangent...) to find the height of the rocket.

If that ^ confused you, send me a message and I will explain it better.

Hope this helps

Answer 3

There are cheap commercial altimeters available for model rockets. There is even a ready to fly rocket with an altimeter nose cone available from Estes.

You could buy the rocket and use that nose cone