[MLB-WIRELESS] Tool for checking LOS between nodes

[Mitch Kelly]

The hey what's that path profiler does all of that and more including
frequency and fresnel zone

On 2 Jan 2017 2:02 PM, "Morgan Reed" <morgan.s.reed at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>        I was a MW member some many (10+) years ago, but never actually got
> around to doing anything about setting up a node (Partially lack of funds,
> but mostly because there wasn't anything in LOS from that place.)
>
> Many years on, the other day I was reminded by the DuxTel website that MW
> exists. Figured I'd stick my head back in, though I'm not sure how much
> activity there is in the community these days (the Website and Mailing List
> archives seem to suggest it's a bit of a ghost town).
>
> In anticipation of perhaps finally setting up a node I did some rummaging
> around to try to determine what nodes were within LOS from my current
> location, after an initial aborted attempt with Google Earth (seriously,
> who the hell implements a pathing function which DOESN'T snap to markers,
> oh and the elevation profile of a path ignores the elevation of the
> coordinates provided...), I spent a bit of time cooking this up today;
>
> https://tools.darkglade.com/mwLos/
>
> It's pretty ugly and the code is horrible (I might fix it one day), but it
> pretty much works.
>
> The only nodes it loads automagically are the ones in the Geelong region
> because that's where I live (if somebody wants to give me a full list of
> the active nodes, ideally in this format https://tools.darkglade.com/
> mwLos/nodes.json (or access to a database that has the data in it) I'll
> happily stuff that in the back).
>
> The chart down the bottom shows LOS (red), actual ground level elevation
> (blue), the two green traces are the ground level elevation lifted 4m
> (nominal height of a single storey building) and 7m (nominal height of a
> double-storey building) so you can tell more or less if you actually have
> LOS over surrounding buildings (at least if you're not surrounded by
> highrises).
>
> I arbitrarily picked two nodes in Geelong city for the initial start/end
> point, but if you plug your lat/long/alt (height of your antenna above
> ground) into the "Start" fields and hit "Update" you can then click around
> the other nodes to see the terrain profile between you and them. The "End"
> fields will allow you to plot to arbitrary coordinates if you want to see
> something that's not already on the map.
>
> One warning though, it won't be terribly accurate over long distances, as
> the Elevation API is limited to 512 points per request, as such long
> distances may be problematic (should be pretty good to ~5km though), if I
> can be bothered (and assuming there's a decent path splitting algorithm
> available in the APIs) I might fix that by breaking the paths down into
> smaller chunks and querying them separately.
>
> Figured it might be useful for other people.
>
> Morgan
>
>
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