Locating radio towers

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MavEtJu
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Locating radio towers

Post by MavEtJu » 08 June 15 5:55 pm

Greetings,

After having logged some trig stations I was wondering if other people are interested in logging radio towers too. I do already have a large amount of them on my camera but never ever indexed them or kept track of which ones I do have or which ones I'm missing.

Would this something which could be added to the Geocaching Australia database?

Edwin

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Richary
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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Richary » 08 June 15 6:00 pm

Are we just talking ones for radio stations, or any sort of broadcasting/comms tower (which would lead to a rather large number).

If the former I have the ACMA lists showing down to the nearest second the location of all the ones used for AM and FM (and TV) though in some cases the transmitter for a low power FM relay is likely to be nothing more than a whip antenna and not very noticeable.

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Just a cacher
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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Just a cacher » 08 June 15 6:14 pm

Pssst! Don't tell C@W. There's no telling what he might do with that sort of data.

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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by MavEtJu » 08 June 15 6:43 pm

> Are we just talking ones for radio stations, or any sort of broadcasting/comms tower (which would lead to a rather large number).

Anything huge with a dish or a set of antennas on it and a building below it: See http://imgur.com/a/oq2XV#0 (First one is in Bega, second one is near Corrimal and the third one near Scarbourgh) Recently I also caught an NBN operated one (for which I couldn't find a photo anymore). The advantage of them is that they have identification codes on them so you have some idea of what they are.

I'm not really interested in the local area stuff as they are not as accessible and don't have any real identification spots (but it could be that people like them, who am I to judge them).

Edwin

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Richary
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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Richary » 08 June 15 9:25 pm

Anything huge with a dish or a set of antennas on it and a building below it: See http://imgur.com/a/oq2XV#0 (First one is in Bega, second one is near Corrimal and the third one near Scarbourgh) Recently I also caught an NBN operated one (for which I couldn't find a photo anymore). The advantage of them is that they have identification codes on them so you have some idea of what they are.
That is a lot of towers out there depending on where you draw the line. I know because my work involves microwave radio installations and I drive around looking at them (and occasionally climbing them but I'm getting a bit old for that on the big ones and prefer to leave it to the younger guys) all the time. Some have IDs on them to show you who owns them and a site ID (Crown Castle being one example). Some of the other smaller ones may just be a lattice mast behind a business so where to draw the line? Many mountain tops will have 3 or 4 so a lot of logs could be gained in a short time. How close do you need to get to claim a find as well?

What about a tower on a building, here in Sydney Westfield Bondi comes to mind. Or hospitals that don't have a tower per se but do have multiple antennas on the roof, though the new Kolling building at Royal North Shore has a small tower on the roof but it's only about 10 metres high.

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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Laighside Legends » 11 June 15 9:34 pm

I was going to suggest the following webpage but it appears to be offline at the moment (well the map page is anyway). It used to have a map of every registered and fixed location RF transmitter in the country. Mostly mobile phone base stations and microwave links but also a reasonable number of RTK/DGPS correction transmitters. And of course the TV and broadcast radio transmitters, although not many of these...

http://spench.net/drupal/software/ozgeorfmap

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Richary
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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Richary » 12 June 15 10:43 pm

I remember seeing others, but the official list is run by ACMA. Of course a lot of sites registered are now redundant and there is probably nothing there, and could also be business premises or a house. But if you select search by sites and put in say your suburb name in the search field, it will show all the matches. You can then choose one of them, and click on a nearby sites map.

http://web.acma.gov.au/pls/radcom/regis ... .main_page

though it seems to be running quite slowly tonight. Or could just be my PC.

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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by MavEtJu » 14 June 15 4:47 pm

Let's close this as "too difficult".

While I would like to have tracked the really big ones in the middle of forests et al, it is hard to make a proper list and find the right properties on which a tower would be included. "Big" and "long distance" isn't such one :-)

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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by ian-and-penny » 14 June 15 7:04 pm

Richary wrote:Are we just talking ones for radio stations, or any sort of broadcasting/comms tower (which would lead to a rather large number).

If the former I have the ACMA lists showing down to the nearest second the location of all the ones used for AM and FM (and TV) though in some cases the transmitter for a low power FM relay is likely to be nothing more than a whip antenna and not very noticeable.
Do you have (and can you make available)locations for mobile phone/internet towers?

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Richary
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Re: Locating radio towers

Post by Richary » 16 June 15 9:21 pm

ian-and-penny wrote: Do you have (and can you make available)locations for mobile phone/internet towers?
Not easily, I could run reports showing all registered ones in a certain frequency range within a postcode range, but that would still include micro base stations internal to shopping centres etc. It would take a while as for that I am limited to online queries which return a limited number of queries. To get a list of all the tall ones would require purchasing the ACMA database on CD which would then be immediately out of date. But with that it might be possible to filter on transmitter power or antenna gains to specify the bigger ones.

The one for broadcast AM/FM/TV stations is published by ACMA as a separate list that anyone can download either as a PDF or Excel.

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