Radio Mobile is a free and powerful tool for plotting RF patterns and predicting the performance of radio systems. Using freely available terrain elevation data it can produce grey scale, x-ray and rainbow colored virtual maps. One can also produce 3-D and stereoscopic views as well as fly by animations.

Background images can be merged with scanned maps, satellite photos and Mapquest maps to produce accurate prediction plots. You can obtain your copy of Radio Mobile from the official website.

Radio Mobile - Main Windows

Installing Radio Mobile

There are two ways to install Radio Mobile. You can either download the installer file available through this website or download the individual compressed files from the Radio Mobile website or the QSL.net mirror.

Obtaining Elevation Data
Before you can really do anything with Radio Mobile you need to obtain the proper elevation data for the area in which you are creating plots. It accepts elevations in a number of formats including SRTM, DTED and GTOPO30. Fortunately most of this data is available free of charge and with a little effort is easily installed.

Installing Elevation Data
You have downloaded some elevation data you first need to extract Radio Mobile  and then configure Radio Mobile so that it can find it. If you downloaded GTOPO30 or DTED data from the sites mentioned previously you may notice the files have the extension tar.gz. In the UNIX world this is known as a “tarball” and this short 7-Zip Tutorial will show you how to extract the data contained within the tarball you downloaded.

Radio Mobile Creating A Map

You have Radio Mobile configured to use your elevation data you can begin creating maps. Click on File | Map Properties and you will again be presented with the Map Properties window. This time make sure you uncheck “ignore missing files” and have SRTM set as one of your data sources. The reason for doing this is to get it to tell you which SRTM data files are missing so you download the missing pieces. There are some holes in the SRTM coverage so there is a chance you will not be able to download the missing files. If this is the case check “ignore missing files” after you have filled in as many missing pieces as possible. Keep update software of The Radio Mobile.

See also: FM Transmitter MP3 Circuit – FM Antenna Diagram