This is what I’ve been doing the past few hours. I know I’ll pay for it dearly in the essence of that I’ll not get any sleep, but it’s pretty cool. I’ve been poring through FCC records all night looking at the owners and locations of all communications towers in the area. It started when I was researching license ownership of the cell phone frequency bands around here (mainly out of disbelief that Boonville, Indiana, population 3, has 3G in the middle of a cornfield and we don’t). AT&T owns the license to the 850MHz band, Alltel in fact has the 1900MHz band. AT&T apparently needs both to deploy 3G, as I noticed while researching locations that actually had 3G. Anyway, back to the story at hand, this ASR database has the location, owner, and height of every tower in the nation. As I was looking at the list of towers licensed to Owensboro, I decided to plug the values into Google Earth and see what I got. Most impressive and lifelike was the array of towers behind Time Warner Cable, shown in the image above. (Click it for something bigger.) That’s cool and all, but you learn a few things, like the fact that AT&T actually owns that tower right behind Ohio Valley 2-Way Radio out on 54, while Ohio Valley 2-Way Radio’s tower is actually about a mile down the road behind Highland Elementary. Speaking of AT&T owning towers, they own all their own towers (as “NEW CINGULAR WIRELESS PCS LLC”), while carriers like Verizon rent them from a company called Crown Castle International. Kenergy also has towers sprinkled throughout the county, and there are apparently two towers with two different owners on Fulton Drive spaced 1/10 of one second of longitude from each other. Drive by on the 60 bypass, and you see only one. The city of Owensboro owns the tower on Police Hill and even though Regent Broadcasting does own that behemoth tower on Frederica behind their studio, it’s actually the backup transmitter according to their FCC license. The primary transmitter is near Utica and is much taller at 320 meters compared to the one we see, which stands at 130.8 meters.

Anyway, that’s enough of me boring the crap out of you with this meaningless drivel. At least I thought it was cool.

This is how I look at what’s coming. I have KML files of the NWS warning polygons and several assorted radar images loaded into Google Earth, including storm relative motion and wind velocity data. (Download here.) This is cool because if you’re into that thing you can be just like the people on TV that zoom in on towns and show the little polygons and whatever. 

I just remembered that I posted almost the exact same thing almost two years ago but the images that went with it have been lost somewhere.