Some notes on UKWtools GPL RF coverage software
 

Mainly posting this so it becomes a record for later lookup by
experimenters.

UKWtools is GPL RF coverage prediction software based on the Longly-Rice
model. It uses a mix of GTOP30/Globe 30 arcsecond data and SRTM 3
arcsecond data (both freely downloadable)

From the website you can download both Windows and Linux packages. -
http://www.qsl.net/g4klx/software.htm

I am not the author of the software!

The notes....

- When I tried to build and install on Suse Linux 9.1 the path plot
function would fail and crash the program. It had worked fine on a
lesser version of SuSE. This appears to be a change in the default
character/language that happened with 9.1. The author mentioned that he
didnt have the same problem with his 9.1 but did say he had compiled his
own WxWidgets. Whatever the case changing the "LANG" variable before
launching the program is a viable workaround. I simply wrote a bash script;

#!/bin/sh
LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-1
cd /usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin/ukwtools

launched that, and the problem went away.. The original LANG variable
was "UTF-8" but since you are only changing it for running this
programme it wont hurt anything.

- Since I am moving to the US early next year I had a look at modifying
the code to use the higher resolution SRTM (1 arcsecond or about 30m
tiles) data available. I found that modifying the two lines in App.cpp
with the SRTM3 grain settings of 1201 to that for SRTM1 (3601), it
seemed to work! Note that it is also possible to change the display
window size (not scalable) to different sizes in Defs.h)

Pls note that I havent fully tested this but the terrain looks correct
and a sample coverage plot seems to conform to terain features around it.

If you wish to respond to this post I will be checking. The reply email
address however is bogus. Just substitute bcnuup for bcnntp.

Cheers Bob VK2YQA