creating the map of low power FM opportunities. Low Power FM opportunities exist in places where FM channel locations are not excluded. Channel exclusions happen in places where channels are protected by rules mostly to protect interference. See the FCC web site for a full set of LPFM rules.
Low Power FM (LPFM) is an opportunity for local users to start their own broadcasting stations on unused frequencies in their area. Currently the rules around LPFM are difficult to visualize.
This project takes all of the towers broadcasting all of the FM stations, and with their attributes and associated protection rules, creates the landscape of opportunities for Low Power FM. That is, it creates the map of which channels are open where given the current landscape of protected stations.
- lowpowerfm.csv - text file in the assets folder
- usa_wgs - unioned polygon table of US land Area (including territories)
- assets - folder containing the data assets required for this process
- processing - contains the procesisng steps
- visualization - contains the visualization steps
- lpfm.py - original code; no longer used
- The resulting map is located here http://www.fcc.gov/maps/low_power_fm_opportunities_wo_2nd.
- An addition animation of all LPFM stations already existing found http://fcc.github.com/lpfmpoints/lpfmpoint.html was developed with this https://github.com/fcc/lpfmpoints code.
in original code base, I had problems w/ st_difference (parallel buffers), and st_union of complex geometries; i switched to using ArcGIS union. alternatively, i developed code to use only st_intersection w/ universe polygon of union of all US area (at 1:10 million)