Proposal talk:Communications Transponder

We should have a "service" tag, to say which kind of service it belongs to.. The ITU terms are FIXED, MOBILE, AMATEUR, NAVIGATIONAL, etc., but maybe "mobile telephone", "radio link", "aero navaid", "maritime AIS", etc. give more meaning. Magne 08:56, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Is it really useful to have line and area tags for this? Magne 08:56, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the idea of the line and areas tags are that a highly directional link could be represented with a way and that the range of transmission/area of coverage could be represented with an area. Not that these make that much sense anyhow. --Mungewell 03:12, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

'communications_transponder:band' is not needed as the band can be inferred from the frequency. --Mungewell 02:54, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

instead of 'communications_transponder:antenna', 'communications_transponder:antenna_type' would make more sense. --Mungewell 02:54, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

communications_transponder:frequency tag

Wouldn't it make more sense to explicitly tag the frequency as either Hz, KHz, MHz, or GHz and assume MHz if not specified (same as the mph option in Maxspeed)?

There are still a number of AM stations operating in rural areas such as the Midwestern and Southeastern US. What about line-of-site Microwave links.

Granted, it's a simple decimal shift in either direction, but I'd recommend giving people the option to give the frequency explicitly in the unit of their choice.

--DiverCTH 15:48, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

What are we trying to achieve here?

Before we get carried away with the precise definition of tags, can I ask what we're trying to achieve here? Certainly the physical aspects - the towers with their heights etc - are pretty essential data for the map, but I question adding transponder data. Unless we're planning to be the world's definitive transponder database, wouldn't this data be better off outside of OSM, perhaps just keyed to a reference tag on the tower node? Just because something can be plotted on a map doesn't necessarily mean it should be stored as part of it. Put it this way - a mapper can go out, see a comms tower, measure its position and height, and add it to the map; but transponder data always needs to be sourced from somewhere else. --Southglos 20:05, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

I think one of the goals of this tag is to be able to identify coverage areas for different One and Two-way radio systems.

One example might be trying to compare a cell company's claimed coverage area against their actual coverage area based on their FCC/(EU Equivalent) licenses.

Another example would be using the map to plot which FM radio stations to listen to on a long road trip.

At least in the context of amateur radio some of this data isn't available electronically in any form of centralized or standardized way so at the very least having a common set of tags that OSM applications support out of pedantic completeness would go a long way toward making third party systems more standardized and easier to interoperate.

Communications equipment in general

Should we expand this tag to cover all wide-area communications equipment? One of the local utility companies in my area is deploying Fiber to the Curb and I'd like to be able to map the location of each of their equipment boxes. --DiverCTH 02:10, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

example photo

How does it look like?!? --katpatuka (talk) 05:25, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

multiple nodes on the same spot

The proposal mentions multiple nodes on the same spot, these can also be represented with type=node relations, currently just a proposal though.—Dieterdreist (talk) 08:22, 16 June 2022 (UTC)