Thanks to all who responded to my question regarding the cell tower data
and procedure described in the April-June 2001 ArcUser magazine. Most who
responded agreed that the data was very inaccurate and lacking to some
degree. The data inaccuracies are apparently due to the lat. & long. info
being entered by the applicant and not FCC, and in some cases were just
estimates. Special thanks to Marc Levesque who directed me to the cell
tower shapefile at http://www.fcc.gov/wtb/geographic . Click on "FCC
licensing database extracts", which will take you to another page where you
can select and download the "Cellular" shapefile. I found this file to be
much more accurate! William Buzzard sent me the following link
http://acc.nos.noaa.gov/Catalog/DigitalAeroInfoCD.html , which is a digital
file of obstacles from NOAA, but I have not investigated this site. Again,
thanks to all who responded!



ORIGINAL QUESTION:
Hey List,

Has anyone else performed the procedure described in the April-June 2001
ArcUser for downloading and extracting cell tower location data from the
FCC? I went through the process just as it was described in the article
without any problems, but the accuracy of the cell tower locations were
terrible. About half of the towers for our county were located outside of
our county boundary, and the half that were inside the county were in the
wrong locations. I tried decimal degrees and projected it into our
coordinate system(SP_Nad83_Tennessee), but with no better results. Anyone
else had better luck with this process?



Danny Kirby
GIS Specialist
Knoxville-Knox County MPC
(865)215-3743
danny.kirby@knoxmpc.org