EVERYTHING near me

One of the temporary casualties of rebuilding the server was access to the “FCC License View” database.    This database contains information on 16 million licenses for fixed location transmitters – AM & FM stations, TV stations, Cell Phone Towers, Paging Services, City departments, Police, Fire, Ambulences, Hospitals, Airports, Paging services, Utility Companies, Railroads, Businesses, etc…

The database does not contain licenses issued to Federal agencies and the military.

The database itself takes up 9 GB of disk space – mySQL starts to be bogged down with tables with millions of rows.

So I added that to the menus at the top of this page – it also is accessible from the Station Info page as a non-obvious link that says (a).

When you start, it will ask you if your browser can divulge your current location.   If you are on a location aware browser, it will fill in your current latitude and longitude.   If you aren’t, you can search by the name of a city.   By default, the page returns everything within 1 mile radius – which can be a lot in an urban area.    If you don’t see much, you can expand the distance.

Returning this list requires calculating the distance between you and every licensed thing near you, which takes a while.    It may take 30 seconds for the page to come back the first time, so please be patient.   If you hammer reload over and over, that will make me very unhappy 🙂

I haven’t gotten any feedback suggesting that anyone really cares about this ability, but there it is.   On each item in the list, there is a “tower” icon that will show you the approximate location of the transmitter in Google Maps.   The FCC and Google use different ways of doing geolocation (the FCC uses the pre-GPS method which is less accurate)…  so locations may be off by up to 200 feet.