Check out
https://www.windy.com/ It has a slider on the lower right side that you can use to change the altitude.
I also think there might be NOAA or NWS sites that have winds aloft information for free for pilots. But one has to remember it’s a prediction. Fly a tracker GPS or RDF if one can. Yeah I know hard to do for a modroc but one shouldn’t be punching stuff up to several thousands of feet with a small rocket that will be hard to see. I’ve done it and have been lucky I’ve found most of them. Sometimes they disappear forever. I’m prepared for that.
...... And don’t put a big honking motor in a new immaculately painted rocket! One is surely going to lose it on the first flight. Do it in a beater rocket that’s been flown hard, cracked off and repaired fins, paint (or whatever is left of it) all scuffed up and raunchy looking. I’ve purposely done that in a beat up Apogee Aspire and believe it or not, cracked fins and all, I recovered it from four F10-8 launches. Three from a relatively small field too.
Murphy’s law in reverse I guess.
Rocket was lost the first launch on an F10-8 at a major event but was found and returned to me. It was very early in my “career”. I then flew the daylights out of it on lower powered motors and started punching it higher and higher. When it looked sufficiently beat up, I did the F10-8 launches again but researched the weather conditions before flying it. If they weren’t right, I just used small motors in an adapter. If they looked good, I punched it.
Ahhhhhhh, coming down from 4 to 5 thousand feet takes a very long time even on a streamer. I swivel my head all around to scan as I know the rocket could be any direction after a flight that high. I use a longer mylar fan folded streamer and more often than not out in the country with no city noise, my ears would hear the rapping sound of the fluttering mylar streamer and they would direct my eyes to where the rocket was coming in. Plastic surveyors tape doesn’t do that noise. That was of course if it was close enough. Then again out in the country, sound travels farther without city noise to squelch it. It could be a pretty fair distance away and I’d still be able to hear it.
A handheld mapping GPS like a Garmin with a ”Sight ‘n Go“ feature can be most helpful if one practices with it.
The Sight ‘n Go allows one to setup the GPS to shoot a line to an object in realtime. Have it in that mode and sight a descending rocket as it’s getting close to the horizon and about to touch down. There are two sighting beads on the face of the device. Line up the rocket with the two beads, push the button to lock it in gives one a course line to the object. If one is interested in getting a GPS like that, make sure you look into the online manual to make sure it has that feature before you buy. Some of the lower cost units don’t have it.
With a streamer ship, one doesn’t have as much time to get a bead but with a parachute one, one can lock it in just before touch down in the tall grass!
The option gives a datum line in the direction of the rocket and of course there is no distance information. One has to keep walking the datum line and scanning carefully in front of them lest they step on the rocket! The nice thing about using a “Sight ’n Go“ feature is if one has to detour around an obstacle to get to the rocket, the arrow on the GPS will keep them going in the right direction to the rocket. I’ve found that out three times when I had to walk around drainage ditches and such that were in the way of a straight line recovery. The GPS kept me going to the touch down site no matter which way I approached it from.
If one can make or get a small noisemaker device to put in their rocket, that can help a lot in recovery. I built several 14 years ago using an N 12V battery that have really helped. If one is “jittery” when they shoot the datum line to the rocket, that course line can be “off” by a bit. A little noisemaker really can help as long as one is not hearing impaired for the terminal phase of recovery. Intact ears are really great direction finders mind you.
If one proceeds to HPR and punching those birds out to “outta sight land” for longer periods of time, can’t beat a GPS tracker of which I have written a lot about here.
Kurt Savegnago