ORIGINAL: rcjon

If you spot a tall communications tower drive to it, if possible. The tower owner and a tower number will be on the fence. You can then use your friendly Internet and Google to find the company and the data for that tower. I found that the one behind my office is 540 feet tall. I look at it frequently and try to take that reference to the flying field.

Our flying field is within a couple of miles of an airport. Purportedly, we are supposed to not fly over 400 feet (and so you know that never happens.) This has lead to several discussions at the field about how high 400 feet was. So when I'm on break behind the office I studied this communications tower that is approximately 1/4 mile from the office. One day we used a laser range finder and trigonometry to estimate a height of just over 500 feet for the tower. I didn't believe the estimate - I didn't think it could be that tall - but we rechecked the calcs - and eventually I drove over to the tower and got information from the gate that enabled me to look the tower up on the Internet and get all its vitals.

All I can say is that when you translate that tower height to our flying field, 400 feet ain't very high.

I've heard that on occasion the control tower has sent the sheriff's department over to the field to caution R/C flyers to fly lower. Our field is not under the usual landing pattern, but sometimes we have Cessnas coming right over us on their base leg and we start screaming "Full Scale! Full Scale!"