<GITHUB loleg/tower-track-ch>

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.

Note: as 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.

A screenshot of the hackday app running in WebKit, detecting the user's location and showing the cell phone towers in Geneva canton on a Swiss Geo Admin map.

Cell phone tower locations in Switzerland are provided by BAKOM (department of communications) on their old Web Geo site - see metadata records. They have now been migrated into layers of the GeoAdmin API, accessible through the main map or here: BAKOM - Standorte von Sendeanlagen.

For the hackday where this project started, 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.

• loleg

• Demo: http://opendata.utou.ch/antennes
• Source: https://github.com/loleg/tower-track-ch
• Blog: http://ol.posterous.com/wheres-my-tower-an-open-data-project (dead link)