GRASS-RaPlaT

Radio Planning Tool for GRASS GIS system

Version 3.1, April 2023

GRASS-RaPlaT is an open-source radio-planning tool. It comprises a number of modules (RaPlaT) that integrate with the GRASS-GIS system (Geographical Resources Analysis Support System) and compute radio signal coverage in a given geographical environment. The results are stored as GRASS-GIS maps and can be written to a standard database (MySQL, PostgreSQL) for further processing.

RaPlaT has been originally developed for mobile phone network (cellular network) coverage computation and therefore supports multi-transmitter systems, but can also be used for a single transmitter/antenna.

The supplied RaPlaT modules (below) were designed for radio coverage calculation of GSM/UMTS systems, but - with the supplied radio propagation model modules - it can also be applied to other wireless systems in the frequency range 400 MHz – 2.4 GHz (e.g. TETRA, WiFi). Due to its open source modular design, users can create additional custom modules for other radio propagation models and frequency ranges.

r.fspl - Free Space

r.hata / r.cost231

r.hataDEM

r.waik

Besides the radio propagation model modules (above), there are two additional modules. The first one, r.sector, takes into account the radiation pattern of an actual antenna as specified by its corresponding MSI file. The second one, r.MaxPower, combines the results of individual antennas into the complete radio network coverage (the example below is for a single transmitter with three antennas).

r.sector

r.MaxPower

The user does not need to deal with calling individual modules (above). Instead, he/she prepares a data table describing the transmitter network and then calls the main script, r.raplat, which takes care of everything else. The script, as well as all the modules, run inside the GRASS environment. GRASS is also used to display graphical results. The results can also be stored in a standard database (e.g. PostgreSQL or MySQL) for further processing with other tools.

Downloads

-     RaPlaT distribution with demo

o   RaPlaT_modules_public_apr2023 (zip)

o   RaPlaT_demo_apr2023 (zip)

-     Documentation

o   User Manual 3.1  (pdf, Ubuntu 22.04 & 20.04)

o   User Manual 3.0  (pdf, Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04)

o   Video presentation (avi) (*)

o   Papers and documents

The tool is released under the GNU General Public License.

(*) The above video was prepared back in 2015 and is a bit outdated. Nevertheless, it is still useful as a quick introduction to RaPlaT, as the main properties of the GRASS and RaPlaT have not changed much since then.