SPLAT!

A Terrestrial RF Path and Terrain Analysis Tool for Unix/Linux

About

This version is a refactoring of the code in 1.5, along with some enhancements to support GDAL. It otherwise does exactly the same calculations, and has the bugfixed and enhancements of 1.5, including multithreading and GDAL support.

The "classic" SPLAT version 1.5 is also available as a separate branch. It is based off John Magliacane's 1.4.2 release, but with a few bugfixes. However, we recommend this 2.0 branch for both stability and performance.

Future version may either use OpenCL or Vulkan to hand computation off to a graphics card in the hopes of even more speed improvements. In preparation for this, itwom3.0 was made fully C99-compliant, as all the current implementations of OpenCL drivers require that. (Later versions of OpenCL allow C++, but none of the common GPU drivers support that).

Building

For this version, you must have CMake and either gcc or clang installed, and it must be a version that supports at least C++11 .

You also need several utility libraries:

• libbzip2
• zlib
• libpng
• libjpeg
• libgdal

and gnuplot for generating graphs.

You can generally get these via system packages. For instance:

Centos 7:

yum install cmake bzip2-devel zlib-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libgdal-devel gnuplot

Debian (Buster) and Ubuntu (18.04 LTS):

apt-get install cmake libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libgdal-dev gnuplot

OSX (High Sierra):

Homebrew

brew install cmake jpeg libpng libgdal gnuplot

MacPorts

port install cmake jpeg libpng libgdal gnuplot

Example Build on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

As an example, a build on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS might look like this:

sudo apt install git cmake
git clone https://github.com/hoche/splat.git
sudo apt install libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libgdal-dev gnuplot
cd splat/build
cmake ..
make

Microsoft Windows

See README_VisualStudio.md

Installation

After building, run

make install

Running

Topography data must be downloaded and SPLAT Data Files must be generated using the included srtm2sdf, postdownload, or usgs2sdf utilities before using SPLAT! Instructions for doing so are included in the documentation.

It is a good practice to create a working directory for SPLAT! use under your home directory:

mkdir $HOME/splat-work

Then:

cd $HOME/splat-work

before invoking SPLAT!

In this manner, all associated SPLAT! working files can be kept in a common directory.

It is important to realize that when analyzing regional coverage areas of transmitters, repeaters, or cell sites, SPLAT! Data Files need to be available for the entire region surrounding the site(s) being analyzed. SPLAT! Data Files can be placed under your SPLAT! working directory, or under a separate directory specified in your $HOME/.splat_path file so SPLAT! can easily find them.

Please read the README file under the utils directory for information on the utilities included with SPLAT!.

Please read the documentation under docs directory, or consult the program's man page for more information and examples of SPLAT! use.

Changes

• Build system

The build system has been converted to CMake.

• SDF file names

  In order to accommodate Windows filesystems, the basic format of the SDF file naming has changed. The colon has been changed to an underline. For instance, instead of having a file named 46:47:122:123.sdf it should now be 46_47_122_123.sdf. The various unix versions (including OSX) will handle either version, but by default srtm2sdf will now create names with the underline. If you don't want this, a "-c" flag has been added to srtm2sdf to preserve your colon.

• splat.cpp

  • Incorporate John's antenna height changes from SPLAT 1.4.3 (unreleased).

  • Revert to using the ITM model by default, in accordance with SPLAT 1.4.3.

  • The PlotLOSMap() and PlotLRMap() functions have been converted to run multithreaded if a "-mt" flag is passed on the command line. If you want to run single-threaded, use "-st" on the command line.

  • WritePPM(), WritePPMSS(), etc were converted to WriteImage(), WriteImageSS(), etc, and functionality was added to allow them to emit png or jpg images instead of pixmaps. png's are now the default. Add "-ppm" or "-jpg" to the command line if you want to generate the others. The generated jpg's are smaller but the text can be hard to read in some instances. The png's are, of course, lossless, and nice and crisp, but they are larger and take slightly longer to generate. Both are an order of magnitude smaller than the pixmaps though.

  • All the DEMs and Paths are allocated on the heap rather than using pre-sized arrays and stack allocations. This means the same code can be used for 1x1 through 8x8 grids, and/or 3-deg (Normal) or 1-deg (High Definition) modes without recompiling. It also means that the code can adjust itself (or error out nicely) depending on the available memory of the host machine.

  • I did some minor fixup to the antenna azimuth (.az) and elevation (.el) reading so that you can now put a value of 0 in those files to indicate your antenna blocks that area perfectly.

• ITWOM 3.0

  • itwom3.0.cpp was renamed to itwom3.0.c and is now compiled with the C compiler rather than the C++ one. In addition, every effort was made to make it fully C99-compliant rather than the peculiar amalgam of C and C++ syntax that it was using.

    itwom3.0 no longer uses the C++ complex number templates (obtained by doing #include ). Instead a small complex-number library is introduced. This was done as part of the effort to make it fully C99 compliant.

  • All the static variables were removed from function scopes within itwom3.0.c in an effort to make the code fully reentrant. This had resulted in a number of changes: - There are a few cases where these were actually consts; those have been defined as such and moved to the global scope. - In a few cases this means that we recalculate variables multiple times. - In other cases, new "state" structs have been introduced that act as local contexts for repeated calls to the same function. All these changes are geared towards making the code multithread-safe.

  • A few variables that are not modified by the various functions have been declared as const. This includes pfl[] arrays.

  • A number of minor fixes were made to itwom3.0 that were disguised by using the C++ compiler. For instance, in a number of places abs() was called when fabs() was meant.

  • Much much code documenting was done. There remains a lot to do though.

To Do

• Since we have to link to zlib for the pngs, we might as well create kmz files if asked.
• More code cleanup.
• Reformat tabs to four spaces.

Acknowledgements

This project and code is based on the original SPLAT! version 1.4.2 by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD: http://www.qsl.net/kd2bd/splat.html