Signal Scout

An antenna install is decided before anyone climbs a roof. Which towers are in range, where to aim, and whether a hill sits in the path decide which antenna goes up, and a wrong call means a second trip.

The installer needed one screen that answers that for any spot, shows the reasoning behind each station, and keeps a record of what the site actually measured on the day.

The app is one full-screen map. Every licensed US full-power and Class A television facility loads from the FCC’s own records, 2,148 of them, regenerated from the source instead of edited by hand. The hand-curated Iowa table it replaced had tower heights low by about half and power off by up to five times, and every prediction moved when it went.

Each station is scored with two-ray propagation over a sampled terrain profile. The profile shows Fresnel zone clearance, marks the crest that blocks a path instead of drawing it green, and lets the receive height be set right on the chart. A validation harness measures the model’s error in dB against FCC reference paths, so a change to the physics has a number to beat.

No customer address is ever stored. Every point is snapped to the nearest intersection or road before the analysis runs, and labels are built from address components, so a house number cannot slip into a saved record.

Live at scout.trydownright.com. Field reports sit beside the prediction for the same spot, recording the level at the meter and whether the TV held the picture, which is what lets the model be checked against real installs.

That loop is where Z-Scouter came from. A prediction is only as good as the reading that checks it, so the next build was the hardware that takes the reading.