Visualyse Terrain Data and Visualyse Professional

One of the key features of Visualyse Professional is the ability to load terrain data. This terrain data can be used by the propagation models in ITU-R Recommendations P.452 & P.1546.

The impact of terrain can have a significant impact on signal strengths, interference levels, coordination contours, and network coverage.

One question we are often asked is what is the maximum resolution of Visualyse Professional and what data can it read?

Visualyse Professional is supplied with the USGS GTOPO 30 terrain database and interfaces to three terrain file formats, including a general Visualyse Professional terrain file format. This latter interface is very flexible and allows Visualyse Professional to read data from a wide variety of sources to a maximum resolution of 1m.

It is therefore possible to read very high-resolution terrain data if it is converted into this general file format.

As an example we have written a utility to convert data generated by the USGS Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) into Visualyse ".GEN" format.

This data has horizontal resolution of 90 m and CDs can be ordered from the web site: http://srtm.usgs.gov

We can supply converted terrain files in Visualyse format processed to identify sea areas for a small charge to cover handling.

As an example, these figures show how the predicted coverage of a transmitter changes between 30 arc second and 3 arc second terrain data.