[MLB-WIRELESS] Tool for checking LOS between nodes

[Morgan Reed]

Would've been nice if I'd have found that yesterday...

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Mitch Kelly <mitchkelly24 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/mw
>> Los/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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>>
>>


-- 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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