Canadian Spectrum Management Data

A question sent to Industry Canada’s Saint John office elicited a pointer to a very useful resource I’d not seen before: Spectrum Direct, a sort of “one stop shop” for spectrum management-related data in Canada.

The most interesting resource for me is the Geographical Area Search: you can enter a latitude and longitude and get information on licensed uses of radio spectrum in that area. This means you can get information on the location of mobile phone towers, radio broadcast towers, and so on. And it outputs HTML, ASCII and XML!

For example, I grabbed an ASCII file of “PCS/cellular stations” for 50km around Charlottetown, did a little regular expression magic in BBEdit to reformat and filter out all but the Rogers’ ones and, with the help of GPSVisualizer, created a map showing their location:

Map Showing Rogers PCS/Cellular Towers around Charlottetown

Comments

Ann's picture
Ann on September 6, 2006 - 18:08 Permalink

Some of the Rogers towers are twinned with Aliant towers…or they were supposed to be. Are those exclusively Rogers towers or both?