Television Station Transmitter POIs

Hi Jim1348
I am one of the three Radio Guys who produced the radio files you refer to. I would be glad to help you create the POI file you are requesting.

The FCC provides a listing of all TV stations which includes the channel they broadcast on, and their location which is enough to produce the file you are looking for.

Go to: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/video/tvq.html. You can add in some search designators such as city, state, type of service, and the range of stations i.e Channel 2-any number up to 69. (You can choose all states to cover the entire US) Under output, choose TV (with some sort of deliminator ie, |) When the search is completed, you can select and copy the entire list into a text file. With an editor, you can create a .csv file and replace the deliminator with a comma. (IF you have trouble doing this, contact me by email and I can help).
Next, open this .csv file in EXCEL. There are probably several columns of data that you will want, and can delete the others. My suggestion would be to work with the call, channel, city, state, and then the individual columns for the longitude deg, long min, long seconds and the same ones for latitude.

You will need to convert from deg/min/sec to decimal degrees. The longitude in the US would be equal to -(long deg +(long min /60)+(lon seconds/3600)) The same calculation, without the negative sign, would be used for calculating the latitude i.e. +(lat deg+(lat min/60)+lat sec/3600)).

You can set this any way you like, but I would now create a new sheet with data from this spreadsheet rearannged in the following order:

Column 1 equal to the calculated longitude
Column 2 equal to the calculated latitude
Column 3 equal to a concatenated value of the Call sign and the channel (probably with a space between them)
Column 4 equal to a concatenated value of the city, state.

This is a long explanation, but it should not take you long to do, once you decide the parameters you need, such as stations 1 through however many you desire.

Let me know if I can be of further help.

I haven't seen the FCC database you're referring to, but I will offer this advice, double check the addresses. For example in Minneapolis/St Paul the 4 major affiliates are scattered around the metro, but all broadcast off of 3 towers in Shoreview, MN. You might use that as an example to double check your FCC list. If it gives you, for example, KMSP, the Fox affiliate's address in Eden Prairie vs. the Shoreview tower address, the difference is almost 30 miles. If you're in the metro it probably won't matter too much, but a lot of TV stations main towers are off site of their main buildings.

The FCC database provides the long and lat for the towers. In the example you provided, I did a quick translation (may have made a math error in translating degrees to decimal degrees) and the location is 565 Gramsie Rd, St. Paul, Minnesota.

When I looked at the FCC database in the link above I noticed something interesting. When I clicked on the link to give me details of the television station I noticed that their location coordinates are in NAD-27 format rather than NAD-83 or WGS-84.

Having done lots of work with land mobile radio systems, the FCC requries NAD-83 or WGS-84 for those stations. I wonder why TV stations still use NAD-27? The error really doesn't make much difference for locating a television transmitter nearby that you want to watch (or listen to) but for some other applications it could be significant.

Just an observation.

Stan

Back when many of the towers were put up, the NAD27 was all there was - and it's what the FAA Obstructions Database required is my guess...

I thought that I would resurrect this post because Mobile DTV is or will be available in many parts of the US soon. I am just wondering if anybody here has an interest in this. The URL below is for a Mobile DTV Service List.

http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=atscmph

There are at least 3 different databases at the FCC for registering transmitters and towers. Hopefully this will all be corrected when they complete the CLS as in Can't Locate Stuff rather than the Combined Licensing System. Look for CLS around 2012.

It looks like there is a Mobile DTV Station Guide, but it leaves a lot to be desired before making it a POI File.

http://www.mdtvsignalmap.com/

The link contains an attachment that has all the info needed by the OP. I have converted the lat/long for the towers in my region. I don't know how to convert the complete file from DD/MM/SS to decimal degrees.
I would use the POI file if it is posted.
http://www.rabbitears.info/ss/
Then click on the excel XLS file.

Jeff Boulter has a handy converter right here:

http://boulter.com/gps/

Last spring when I worked on updating the AM & FM transmitter locations for the RadioGuys, I also created a TV transmitter POI. I never uploaded as I considered it a work in progress. The FCC data files are something of a convoluted mess. In the idea world, I could run a query for all active licensed transmitters and I would get a usable report. In the real world, not all active transmitters are fully licensed. Some are running on construction permits yet are marked active. Others are running on applications that for some reason were not updated to active status. And, some of the most frustrating right now are several New York City stations that have construction permits on file to move to the Freedom Tower (whenever it is finally completed). Those records come up active too and can override the transmitter data on the Empire State Building.

I have to say that the developers who built the FCC database did do a good job of normalizing the relational database tables. A large number of SQL "joins" are required to get data out. Unfortunately, either I have not yet figured out the magic algorithm to get one correct record for each station or there actually is no way to do it.

Thanks Jim. I used a similar program to convert about 20 regional stations. I want to globally process the complete file in Excel where there is over 1800 entries.