inigo88 said:
Well done Ex, I've been looking forward to your conclusions on this project since you first said you were taking it on.
Finally, I'd be happy to assist with researching licenses on the State Park system (I offered on CALTRANS too
).
Since CMARS will also appear as licensed to "California, State of"... just as CALTRANS and State Parks 800 mhz repeaters do, I think it would be an extremely worthy project in addition to documenting the State Parks system - and having eliminated the CALTRANS and State Parks freqs from the license pool in each county, it would put all of us in a much better position to do so.
I appreciated your offer when I first posted that I would be working on Caltrans. I had a mixture of things to use in doing the research including:
1. A desk top logbook with the information I got from the Caltrans radio I had my hands on for about 3 weeks.
2. A 1994 Caltrans Statewide Radio Frequency Plan.
3. Notes from some travels I've taken.
4. District radio plans from Districts 6, 7, and 9.
5. Maps of repeater sites from other state agencies such as CDF.
6. Topo USA by DeLorme and all the USGS topo maps for California on disk.
It was difficult to figure out how to break up the job with so many different sources of information, some which were too big to fit into my flat top scanner to make copies for other folks. It was also difficult to imagine someone who would spend dozens of hours on very small details. For example, when I found the repeater site near Arnold, which just for the heck of it I called "Big Trees," I made two phone calls to businesses along Highway 4 after finding them on the Internet, with the purpose of finding out what their Highway 4 addresses were. I took that information and figured the street address I had for this radio site must have been that of Calaveras Big Trees State Park and called them to ask them their physical address as it was not on their website. That verified that his particular radio sites was on State Park land, but only by a couple hundred feet or so. So my hunch that I should call this site Big Trees was validated. This is certainly a big improvement over calling it 1170 East Highway 4, Arnold.
I also searched the Internet for physical addresses of Caltrans maintenance stations to double check that with FCC records that showed street addresses. At times I would use Google Earth to actually look for an electronic site when the location information on the appeared to be very much in error. Often the look of the roads and buildings gained from Google Earth quickly identify the locations of electronic sites. They don't all give the name of a geographic feature and sometimes they write lat and long numbers down wrong when filling out FCC paperwork.
The repeaters along the borders of some districts were difficult to track as to which district they belonged to. I had to use the addresses in the "Control Point" portion of the FCC licenses and match them up to facilities in each Caltrans District, some of which were not those of the District Office as listed on the Caltrans website. I had to call some Districts and ask them to verify the addresses I had as being their facilities.
My mapping software also includes lat and long searches. When I determined the location of the location listed in the license I added map tags to the maps. I have hundreds of electronic sites I've found over the years, using FCC data and agency publications I've been able to get my hands on, mostly by nature of my previous career. Once I had a District's sites tagged, I would look at the entire District on the map and find some difficult to find sites after seeing where the "holes" on the map were. This also provided additional reasons to verify that a non-licensed site was no longer in use as it may have been replaced by another site nearby that was licensed.
All of this included writing down all the pertinent data from the licenses as I didn't want to use a lot of paper and print each license out.
Without knowing other people and how detail oriented they are it is hard for this perfectionist to delegate! I'm not saying that no one else could do it, I just wanted to do it myself! I'm not looking for any pats on the back here, this is the standard of work I would do for myself, and just feel that any work I do for myself should be shared. That is, if the information I have came with the permission to use it for more than "my eyes only."
I'm not saying my information is infallible either. It is just a good place to start listening from. Unfortunately what I have is incomplete and not right up to date. FCC license data should be very good, but I've worked around radio systems long enough to know that it doesn't always reflect the actual on the ground situation.
I think you are right on with the need to research CMARS. Kelty looks like he put some good work into it, but perhaps not statewide and recently. I found that most of the licenses for this system had the address of 301 Sequoia Pacific Blvd. in Sacramento, which is the address for whatever name the California Dept./Div of Communications is these days. Some of the licenses have more local addresses.
I have a lot of "stuff" from California State Parks. I've picked up bits and pieces here and there from friends, some from letters I've written, some notes from trips, some by reading all the way through some obscure publications they put out, and some from my career. How about you research CMARS and let me take on State Parks? I'm beginning to get a handle on where the electronic sites for the state are and that will be of great aid to me. I don't know how I would share that info with you as the version of Topo USA I have is 4 years old now, so even if you did have Topo USA by DeLorme I'm not sure how to send those files to someone else. I may be detail oriented but I'm not very computer savvy.
Does that sound like a plan?
