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AustinDotCom · 08-13-2002

Check out Radio Mobile, a mapping tool designed for wireless.

It imports USGS data for elevations, mapblast data for streets,
and has all of the predictive math needed to plan your links. It will plot an elevation view of your fresnel zones while showing how much of your zone is missing. Very cool for the wireless planner. Handles all frequencies, handles all parameters such as cable loss, receive threshold, antenna gain, etc.

And as a bonus, I figured out how to import netstumbler data!
There is a cities.dat file which is simply lon and lat for cities with the city name and font color and position. I took my netstumbler output and reformatted it (using awk, grep, sort, vi and uniq) into a small set of samples, only one sample per lon/lat set. I then applied some font color based on signal level, and gave it a name according to the channel in use. I end up with maps that are very useful for plotting cell coverage and mapping interfering networks. Gives you a way to do spectrum management for a cell, planning for best results within the cell.

Of course it is also usable as a general mapping tool. It is not as pretty as some of the maps, but is very useful for someone managing a public access wireless network.

Formatting the data took a while since I used the wi-scan export data as the basis, throwing out about 3/4th of the data to make the resulting maps cleaner and more clear.

Download radio mobile at:
http://www.cplus.org/rmw/english1.html

Also, in case you don't already think Radio Mobile is the coolest free wireless mapping tool around, it's capabilities go farther...

If you hook your GPS to Radio Mobile, you can set it up to track your position, sending the position data to other machines running Radio Mobile. So for example, you could have a fleet of trucks, with wireless IP to the central office, and from the central office see where all of your trucks are in real time! If your network supports the multicast, all stations on the trucks and in the offices will all see the same real-time view.

So you can use it to plan a wireless data network, then track vehicles within it... if that's what you want to do. Of course you have to want to do that... We wanted to start up a web based delivery service using runners with GPS systems, and two-way
messaging. This would have been the thing you project on the wall to plot the locations of the delivery runners. But I digress...

MapPoint is great, but it costs money, and isn't really designed for engineering wireless networks. Radio Mobile is free, and is a nice tool for what it is. It is a little clunky in how you build the layers up of a map, and there is little documentation... but so what!

08-13-2002	#5 (permalink)
AustinDotCom Registered Member Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Austin Texas Posts: 2	Check this out... Check out Radio Mobile, a mapping tool designed for wireless. It imports USGS data for elevations, mapblast data for streets, and has all of the predictive math needed to plan your links. It will plot an elevation view of your fresnel zones while showing how much of your zone is missing. Very cool for the wireless planner. Handles all frequencies, handles all parameters such as cable loss, receive threshold, antenna gain, etc. And as a bonus, I figured out how to import netstumbler data! There is a cities.dat file which is simply lon and lat for cities with the city name and font color and position. I took my netstumbler output and reformatted it (using awk, grep, sort, vi and uniq) into a small set of samples, only one sample per lon/lat set. I then applied some font color based on signal level, and gave it a name according to the channel in use. I end up with maps that are very useful for plotting cell coverage and mapping interfering networks. Gives you a way to do spectrum management for a cell, planning for best results within the cell. Of course it is also usable as a general mapping tool. It is not as pretty as some of the maps, but is very useful for someone managing a public access wireless network. Formatting the data took a while since I used the wi-scan export data as the basis, throwing out about 3/4th of the data to make the resulting maps cleaner and more clear. Download radio mobile at: http://www.cplus.org/rmw/english1.html Also, in case you don't already think Radio Mobile is the coolest free wireless mapping tool around, it's capabilities go farther... If you hook your GPS to Radio Mobile, you can set it up to track your position, sending the position data to other machines running Radio Mobile. So for example, you could have a fleet of trucks, with wireless IP to the central office, and from the central office see where all of your trucks are in real time! If your network supports the multicast, all stations on the trucks and in the offices will all see the same real-time view. So you can use it to plan a wireless data network, then track vehicles within it... if that's what you want to do. Of course you have to want to do that... We wanted to start up a web based delivery service using runners with GPS systems, and two-way messaging. This would have been the thing you project on the wall to plot the locations of the delivery runners. But I digress... MapPoint is great, but it costs money, and isn't really designed for engineering wireless networks. Radio Mobile is free, and is a nice tool for what it is. It is a little clunky in how you build the layers up of a map, and there is little documentation... but so what! Last edited by AustinDotCom : 08-13-2002 at 03:07 AM.