This is an old revision of the document!
Where's My Tower?
<github loleg/swiss-tower-finder>
Mockup of a mobile app that shows the promixity of the user to the nearest radio communication tower. This allows a user without reception to know in which direction to walk to get a signal, or for people trying to go as offline as possible to find the nearest “hole” in reception.
A screenshot of the app (the final app UI is not complete yet) running in WebKit, detecting the user's location and showing the cell phone towers in Geneva canton on a Swiss Geo Admin map.
Note: signal quality varies strongly depending on the height difference and topography of the land, distance alone is not enough to paint an accurate picture of signal reception. This app may not be relied upon in an emergency.
Data
Cell phone tower locations in Switzerland are provided by BAKOM (department of communications) on their old Web Geo site - see metadata records, and are in the process of being migrated into a layer on the GeoAdmin API (target: end of 2012). In the meantime, a subset of the data for the Canton of Geneva is available to us via the Geneva geoportal. Special thanks to Adrien Viera from SITG for his help with this.
Read more on how the open data was converted for the prototype on Oleg's blog.