Or at least money in such. Brendan Greeley, or as we call him for no good reason the Gree-man, wrote about a wireless broadband gold rush set off by an obscure provision of the payroll tax bill: dead-air broadcast TV channels, kept empty to avoid interference with neighboring markets, can now be filled with the siren song of whatever. Good news for rural areas written off by broadband telecoms. I put together a last-minute graphic showing what areas would benefit most.
First, the data. I found endless iterations of this map:
and since time was short, I just burned 90 minutes hand-chloroplething it onto my own projection. But a) pain in the ass b) “number of white space channels available”? Each has between 7 and 11 segments? What does this even mean? Andrew Pielack at Spectrum Bridge (the original authors of the map) told me that this was too old to be useful. But he had something recent:
Which is not only diced finer than the county level, highlighting the dearth of free spectrum in dense metropolitan areas and its abundance in the boonies. It’s also labeled in a way that makes sense: high availability, low availability.
Next Q: can he reproject that to azimuthal? Or at least a less assey projection? No he cannot. Luckily Kenton figured out a not-too-bootleg way to do it in Mapublisher.
Just get it onto its own layer, drag it into the current map view, match the size to the real ‘Merica, and apply a new projection. It’ll go right along with it. After it’s reprojected, time to get all the colors grouped, changed and simplified. Brought it from 100,000 points to under 50,000. And now to actually put it on page.
The first version with an explanation of spectrum whitespace appended. You know how in your town has Action News 5, while the next city over has Action News 6? And you don’t have a channel 6 and they don’t have a channel 5? That alternation is to prevent interference. Don’t covet thy neighbor’s chunk of the EM spectrum. Those empty channels can be used now according to the law, so that’s why we’re running the story. Anyway, enough thematics, here’s the next iteration:
Adds some veritas with real channels from real adjacent markets, but too texty and dense. Anathema to our fantastic AD wizard Cindy Hoffman. Nixed! Next!
Cut down to one set of channels. Simpler. That’s what we went with, I think it turned out pretty good for a short notice graphic. Did some web versions too which you’ll probably never see:
In conclusion, I do a lot of spectrum graphics. And by a lot I mean two so far. Seems like a lot.
—Evan
