Categories
GIS

Got a receiver inside my head – writing Spectrum Direct data as CSV

Industry Canada publishes the locations of all licensed radio spectrum users on Spectrum Direct. You can find all the transmitters/receivers near you by using its Geographical Area Search. And there are a lot near me:

While Spectrum Direct’s a great service, it has three major usability strikes against it:

  1. You can’t search by address or postal code; you need to know your latitude and longitude. Not just that, it expects your coordinates as a integer of the format DDMMSS.
  2. It’s very easy to overwhelm the system. Where I live, I can pretty much search for only 5km around me before the system times out.
  3. The output formats aren’t very useful. You can either get massively verbose XML, or very long line undelimited text, and neither of these are very easy to work with.

Never fear, Perl is here! I wrote a tiny script that glues together Dave O’Neill‘s Parse::SpectrumDirect::RadioFrequency module (which I wonder if you can guess what it does?) to Robbie Bow‘s  Text::CSV::Slurp module. The latter is used to blort out the former’s results to a CSV file that you can load into any GIS/mapping system.

Here’s the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# spectest.pl - generate CSV from Industry Canada Spectrum Direct data
# created by scruss on 02010/10/29 - for https://glaikit.org/

# usage: spectest.pl geographical_area.txt > outfile.csv

use strict;
use Parse::SpectrumDirect::RadioFrequency;
use Text::CSV::Slurp;
use constant MINLAT => 40.0;    # all of Canada is >40 deg N, for checking

my $prefetched_output = '';

# get the whole file as a string
while (<>) {
 $prefetched_output .= $_;
}

my $parser = Parse::SpectrumDirect::RadioFrequency->new();

# magically parse Spectrum Direct file
$parser->parse($prefetched_output) or die "$!\n";
my $legend_hash = $parser->get_legend();    # get column descriptions
my @keys        = ();
foreach (@$legend_hash) {

 # retrieve column keys in order so the output will resemble input
 push @keys, $_->{key};
}

# get the data in a ref to an array of hashes
my $stations = $parser->get_stations();

my @good_stations = ();

# clean out bad values
foreach (@$stations) {
 next if ( $_->{Latitude} < MINLAT );
 push @good_stations, $_;
}

# create csv file in memory then print it
my $csv = Text::CSV::Slurp->create(
 input       => \@good_stations,
 field_order => \@keys
);
print $csv;
exit;

The results aren’t perfect; QGis boaked on a file it made where one of the records appeared to have line breaks in it. It could filter out multiple pieces of equipment at the same call sign location. But it works, mostly, which is good enough for me.

Categories
GIS

using CSV as a virtual data source

While we already know how to make trivial shapefiles with shapelib, sometimes that’s too tedious. Very frequently I get data in Comma Separated Value (CSV) format, and reliably importing/converting it can be a pain.

Here’s our sample CSV file, library_test.csv:

"Easting","Northing","Library"
625539.6,4837170.9,"Dufferin St. Clair"
625862.0,4838241.1,"Oakwood Village"
626251.0,4835287.2,"Bloor Gladstone"
626671.7,4836922.6,"Davenport"
627227.2,4840006.4,"Forest Hill"

ogr has a CSV driver. In its documentation the Virtual Format driver is touched upon. This allows you to set up a data definition file, especially useful if you read the same format frequently.

Here’s the VRT file for that CSV:

<OGRVRTDataSource>
    <!-- note that OGRVRTLayer name must be basename of source file -->
    <OGRVRTLayer name="library_test">
        <SrcDataSource>library_test.csv</SrcDataSource>
        <GeometryType>wkbPoint</GeometryType>
        <!-- your SRS goes here; I used EPSG SRID -->
        <LayerSRS>EPSG:2958</LayerSRS>
        <GeometryField encoding="PointFromColumns" x="Easting" y="Northing"/>
   </OGRVRTLayer>
</OGRVRTDataSource>

Your CSV file will now behave like a shapefile, or indeed any other geo-format that OGR understands. QGIS is a bit picky – it doesn’t seem to always work out the path of the source file.

To prove these are real coordinates, here’s what I did to make a Google Earth KML file:

ogr2ogr -f KML -t_srs EPSG:4326 library_test.kml library_test.vrt -dsco NameField=Library

Technically, you don’t need to specify the SRS for KML output as it only supports EPSG:4326, but I found you got trivially different results if it was omitted.

Try this in Google Earth: library_test.kml