Coverage Tools

Coverage Tools

Four complementary ways to visualize what the scanner will scan around a given point.

Nearest Systems (tree annotations)

When Enable Location Filter is active, the top-level tree view prefixes each system with its distance-rank (#1, #2, ...) and sorts groups inside by distance from the center point. No extra dialog needed.

Coverage Heatmap

Heatmap... opens a heatmap overlaid on a real tile-server map. Each cell's color shows how many coverage circles overlap that point, so hotspots jump out on top of familiar geography instead of floating in a black square.

Controls in the dialog:

• Span (mi) - how far out from the center the heat grid extends. The span also prunes tower markers and coverage circles, so zooming in on a 5-mile radius genuinely shows only towers inside that box instead of every tower in the file.
• Tile server - OpenStreetMap (default), Google map, Google satellite.
• Show tower markers - overlay the individual tower / group pins so you can correlate hotspots with named sites.
• Show coverage circles - outline each tower's advertised range as a circle. Off by default so a dense file doesn't turn the map blue.
• Scanner buttons - Police / Fire / EMS / DOT / Multi checkboxes and an Other types toggle. These mirror the main toolbar's button simulation, so the heatmap shows exactly what the scanner will scan with that button combo held.
• Show removed towers (grayed) - when on, any group or system the user has deleted since the last SD-card sync is drawn as a gray marker (and optionally a gray coverage circle), so it's easy to see what was pruned vs. what still lives on the card. The diff is comprehensive: it compares the live tree against the session snapshot (the real HPD file as it was when you opened it) and also replays any unreverted delete events, so whole-system deletions, bulk cleanups, and per-entry removals all surface uniformly.

The heatmap renders the intensity grid as a small number of merged-rectangle overlays rather than one polygon per cell, so pan and zoom stay smooth even on systems with hundreds of coverage circles. Repeater sites shared by several systems collapse into one marker; click it to see the full list of systems and groups that live at that tower in a tree dialog.

Install the optional map dependency to enable tile support:

python -m pip install tkintermapview

If tkintermapview isn't available, the heatmap falls back to the legacy pure-Tk density grid (no map tiles) so the feature still works in headless or locked-down environments.

Coverage Map

Map... opens the tile-server map with each tower drawn as a coverage-circle polygon plus a marker. It uses the same tile providers as the heatmap (OSM, Google, Google satellite) and the same tower-clustering logic, so a repeater shared by several systems shows up as one marker that opens a tree listing every system and group homed on it.

Export Effective Scan Set

Export Effective Scan Set... writes a CSV or TXT of exactly the rows visible under the current filter, with extra columns useful for analysis:

• Lat, Lon, Range (mi), Distance (mi).

Great for spreadsheet triage or sharing a layout with another scanner owner.

Tuning the filter

• Tolerance slider (toolbar) widens / narrows the effective radius by +/- miles. Positive values include more distant groups; negative values trim aggressively.
• Button filters (Police/EMS/Fire/DOT/Multi) restrict to service types that map to those physical buttons; see Scanner Button Service Types.