Thursday
Jan122006
Mapping NPR Coverage
Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 3:07PM NPR's station finding service now has a little Google Maps add-on that displays the locations of station transmitters near you, and how powerful they are. At first I thought they had forgotten to include the signal strength polylines for KQED, but then I zoomed out and realized it's just really, really powerful.
Reader Comments (1)
On behalf of people without satellite-radio, thanks!
I tested it on a few Montana locations where NPR can be hard-to-find, and it's very interesting. In the area from Drummond to Deer Lodge along I-90, in my experience it's sometimes possible to get stations from either Missoula or Butte, and the mapped coverage area reflects that weak overlap, even though only one or the other station comes up depending on the target city.
The signal strength data comes from (an interesting resource in itself), which provides signal strength info, but I'm not certain how the NPR site maps the spatial variation. The coverage areas are not circular and they seem to accurately correlate with topography, e.g. for .