Counteracting bad LPFM data in LMS

REC placed a couple of emergency fixes into various systems this morning to deal with the ongoing bad information coming from the FCC on LPFM records.

Modified back office systems and FCCdata to regard a station in which the app_antenna.aant_antenna_type_code from LMS is blank.  Normally, this is the field in LMS that designates an antenna to be directional or nondirectional.  Systems will treat blank entries as nondirectional facilities.

Added additional functionality to also monitor the license_filing_version.active_ind field in LMS in order to qualify a record as an "active" record eligible for protection.  This modification will reduce false negatives in channel searches. 

Added some additional functionality to "correct" the effective radiated power levels that are delivered from LMS on LPFM records.  In some cases, the power levels can read either less than 1 watt or more than 100 watts (we were seeing some LPFM stations showing in the data as 100,000 watts as a result of this bad data from the FCC).  Records with no power at all will be "assigned" a power based on the facility's height above average terrain.  

As a part of the previous problem, we will do an overnight or weekend project to refresh all of the contour map data for all LMS LPFM records.

 

Date: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Systems affected: 
FCCdata.org
myLPFM v3
NCE Preliminary Search Tool
Issue type: 
Enhancement
FCC issue