Cover me! Over!

June 25, 2007 1:48 PM

Does anybody know of any software (Prefer free, web-based or hosted but want to hear it all) for easy and simple mapping of radio station coverage?

I have a need to map coverage as preferably a semi-transparent coloured area over a map. The coverage area isn't based on any data able to be parsed (i.e. co-ordinates or radio signal strength or anything) and is supposed to be an approximate area of coverage.

Since this isn't based on any data the areas have to be altered by hand. Although it may be possible to turn this into some sort of KML feed to load into mapping software...

Also, each station might have more than one coverage area (national station) so it'd be nice to be able to click on/off different stations "layers" on the map.

The current solution being used is a map in photoshop with different layers that are shown/hidden

posted by puddpunk to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I don't know the answer but could you just explain a little more ?

I think what you want to do is to draw coloured/semi-transparent blobs onto a map to represent a transmitter coverage area. You currently use PhotoShop to do this and you want something else to do it with.

Could you just expand a little on what you want the new software to do that PhotoShop cannot ? The reason I ask is that as the data is not parseable it seems to me inevitable that you're still going to have a human drawing blobs at some point and so, I would have thought, you're not going to be much better off than you are with PhotoShop.

I appreciate I may have misunderstood your requirement - maybe you could clarify a little ?

ps - maybe you want smoother curves than you can get freehanding it in PhotoShop ?
posted by southof40 at 2:28 PM on June 25, 2007

Yes you're mostly correct. The problem with the photoshop solution is the fact that it's difficult to share (I realise I should have mentioned this requirement :) with other people that do not have the photoshop software.

I'm actually considering right now turning the blobs into KML polygons and exporting the KML file to be loaded in Google Earth/maps, but as always, curves would be nice!

Was just wondering if anybody had done similar work to this (i.e. approximate cell coverage or wifi) and had any recommendations.

Thanks for your post.
posted by puddpunk at 2:37 PM on June 25, 2007

pudd, instead of photoshop, you could use Paint .NET. Similar tool, but download and installation is totally free, instead of the $1000 for photoshop.

It's pretty intuitive and will let you use layers.
posted by unexpected at 4:03 PM on June 25, 2007

I'm sure you've thought of this but you could export to JPG's from Photoshop and then slap them up on a website - could even put them on Flickr ! You could probably use something like a blog account to do it with to with too - not sure how fancy you require things to be. Would a sort of 'auto-gallery' be OK or do you need something else too.
posted by southof40 at 8:18 PM on June 25, 2007

Quikmaps.com has line or squiggle drawing tools in whatever color you like for drawing directly on Google maps. You can draw a circle the circumference of say, Kansas by upping the radius on the tool to 3000.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:20 PM on June 25, 2007