farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

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bigbloke
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farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by bigbloke »

It seems ofcom has pulled the WTR in its current form.

It was noticeably sluggish outside of office hours and often unavailable at weekends
suggesting that its days were numbered in these austere times.

OFCOM it seems have decided to push out a monthly "dump" of a rationalized set of WTR
data for download as a dataset in CSV (Comma separated varaible) format.

Some key differences:

* "light licences" (Simple site, suppliers light, simple uk) are no longer referenced
* multiple lines per licence makes it harder for amateur data sifters to tally results in frequency order
* Personally identifiable data like email addresses and phone numbers are no longer referenced.
this will make it harder to marry a licencee name to a business (e.g. mohammed takir trading as "Miggins' taxis" )
* Much of the data relates to non business radio users users and may be of little interest to most scanners (e.g. 19GHz P2P links)

Nevertheless the potential for UK uniden scanner app developers just took a quantum leap!
An app that can:
import the file once a month
filter out the irrelevant content
write the remains to modern unidens that support GPS connectivity so you have UK wide area based scanning
is going to clean up!

the dataset is VERY large but once stripped, the salient bits will fit into google sheets and once the LAT and LONG fields are concatenated
can be processed by mapping data (at a cost to the user)
wtdr-anon.jpg
or exported as a KML into google earth ? now theres a possibility!

Who will be the first to automate the process ?

Regards

BB

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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by stratocaster »

B*****ks! I know the webpage was at best frustrating and at worst a complete joke! but, when it did work,(a rarity) putting a pinpoint or wide zone over your area on the map was quite useful to see what and who was around. From what I can gather you have described, this now no longer exists. I've not had a look yet, but I take it this monthly spreadsheet will really have to be scrutinised by frequency hunters? pardon my ignorance on this new webpage!
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by bigbloke »

My error !! the data will be published quarterly not monthly - I have put a linux CRON job to get the file
monthly and perform a "diff"[erence] function to alert me via twitter when the page is updated - hence I had a
"monthly" head on when I wrote it first

Regards

BB
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by Admiral »

Excel is so powerful these days if you know how to use it, so it's a thumbs up from me as the CSV data will be more use to me than a dog-eared lookup service that has been a mare for the last 12 months.
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by stratocaster »

I'll probably take a thorough look over the weekend and give my verdict. Jury's out on this one at the moment!
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by Admiral »

If you're a diehard lookup fanboy then the CSV can be built into a relational database held on your local machine, but with VB scripts I've found Excel almost makes DBs redundant these days.
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by thelad »

Already being worked on i hear.
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by MrWeetabix »

make sense, publish the raw data on a spreadsheet and let those who want the information figure out the best way to extra it. Takes the headache out of providing the info for them really
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by paulears »

Damn! My technically assigned licence is still NOT in that list. However - having the info in a spreadsheet is quite handy.
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by Minus1 »

Does anyone else have the problem of the OFCOM website deciding you are using a tablet or phone, when you are actually using ad esktop compueer, and so presenting the entire site as an absurdly large menu?
I really do think that OFCOM is run by clowns who do not have much of a clue about anything!
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by Admiral »

Minus1 wrote: I really do think that OFCOM is run by clowns who do not have much of a clue about anything!
OFCOM is run generally by hard working, dedicated and professional people doing their absolute best, the shortfalls are because of austerity they have a ridiculously small budget to do an overwhelming amount of work, much of which is mundane.

My biggest fear is that a certain magazine publishing company want more and more power, and it may be tempting to the Government to privatise off the amateur section of OFCOM to them, then the little Hitlers will destroy the hobby completely overnight.

And yes, I find that if I'm using Safari on my old PowerBook then some sites think I'm on an iPhone/iPad and the page defaults to a mobile one.
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by WARLOCK »

With Teresa may and her government in charge what more could you expect ,No money left in the kitty for the likes of OFCOM after THEY( all parties) take there expence,s the kitty is empty for the likes of you and me , Even if we as a country nearly broke our selves, We have loads of money to donate to the EU for nowt in return ???
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by paulears »

As for OFCOM - they hived off the aircraft side to the CAA who seem staffed with totally alien people who cannot understand straightforward questions, speak to you as if you are a child and insinuate you just don't understand them, so should crawl away. when you do get to the right person, their guidelines and rules are often unworkable and ludicrous. I asked if there is a demonstration and testing licence similar to the one in marine band, and this flummoxed them totally. One suggested I'd have to register as an actual airfield! Patience and perseverance eventually got an explanation that made sense, but the answer was that basically, you need permission from the authorised radio licence holder of the airfield to allow you to have a test conversation between a portable on the airfield back to the tower. This could only happen at a low tier field where the tower 'person' was NOT considered a controller, and was simply providing assistance and guidance but has no ability to direct. This would not cover any communication with an aircraft on the ground or in the air under any circumstances. I had a request to supply some hire radios for parachuting - and all I wanted to do was test them on site, before handing them over - a very simple request that took weeks to get a sensible response, which was basically to 'fudge it' and don't ask! An earlier conversation had assured me I had to take the pilots RT test!
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by pete_uk »

What would the new file come under, can't seem to find the right link
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Re: farewell to the WTR - hello to the monthly spreadsheet!

Post by Metradio »

Found this conversation on another forum over the last few days:

"The OFCOM license search has disappeared in the last week or so, does anyone know if this a temporary move, or permanent. I fear the worst.."

"The WTR is visible from inside Ofcom's network but not from outside the network. I've passed it as a fault so it should be working again shortly. If anything changes I'll advise the group."

"I have just had an update from the IT department. The WTR had a fault on the public facing side of the system which caused some issues with the data. They are actively trying to resolve this and will then put the WTR back up for public access.
In short....it will be back."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you have a saved search it will still work, it is only the new searches they have blocked, below is my local UHF frequency search:
http://spectruminfo.ofcom.org.uk/spectr ... mit+search
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