A Perl script to convert the data in the Excel version of the Radio and Television Broadcasting Stations Book into Google Earth placemarks in a .kml file.

Useful for finding the direction from your home to your broadcast transmitters, and for verifying transmitter details.

This isn't really Beyonwiz specific, but I hope it's useful enough to find a home here.

Download
Version: 0.1.2 (Earlier versions in attachments)
Author: prl

Release notes
Requires conversion of the Excel file into CSV format files.
Converting the whole Radio & TV data set results in a fairly large file, about 1.2MB. The size of this file can be reduced to about 600kB with the --towers option, which simplifies the representation of the broadcast towers.

New features:

• Adds --icon option that allows the placemark icon to be set.
• Introductory material added to the documentation, some contributed by NPR from the Beyonwiz Forum.

Bugs:

• The Radio and Television Broadcasting Book only specifies locations of transmitters to the nearest second of arc. While that sounds small, it actually allows for an error of about +-50 metres.
• The Abridged Molodenskiy transformation used to transform the AGD66 latitudes & longitudes of the ACMA data to the WGS84 latitudes and longitudes used by Google Earth adds about another 10m uncertainty.
  The transformation accuracy varies across Australia, and can be quite inaccurate outside outside the mainland and Tasmania.
• The location errors for the Lord Howe Island sites are about 130m. The Lord Howe Island South site is shown in the water which is unlikely to be correct! It's not clear how much of the location error is in the coordinate transformation and the lack of precision in the lat/long, and how much is actual location inaccuracy.
• AM transmitters are typically not a single transmitter tower, they are more usually two towers with a horizontal antenna wire between them (and consequently horizontal polarisation), and the antenna wire is about 100-150m long. The "tower" shown by rtv2kml is usually located near the midpoint of the antenna wire, between its two physical towers. AM transmitter towers are often much narrower than TV broadcast towers, and can often be best seen by their shadow.
• The ACMA issues new broadcaster data every month. If you want to keep up to date, you need to download and convert the data every month.

Version: 0.1.1

Release notes
Requires conversion of the Excel file into CSV format files.
Converting the whole Radio & TV data set results in a fairly large file, about 1.2MB. The size of this file can be reduced to about 600kB with the --towers option, which simplifies the representation of the broadcast towers.

New features:

• Adds --state option that allows output for only the specified state(s).

Fixed:

• If the name of an input file for TV stations doesn't contain either AnalogTV or DigitalTV, no output will be produced for the stations in it.

Bugs:

• The Radio and Television Broadcasting Book only specifies locations of transmitters to the nearest second of arc. While that sounds small, it actually allows for an error of about +-50 metres.
• The Abridged Molodenskiy transformation used to transform the AGD66 latitudes & longitudes of the ACMA data to the WGS84 latitudes and longitudes used by Google Earth adds about another 10m uncertainty.
  The transformation accuracy varies across Australia, and can be quite inaccurate outside outside the mainland and Tasmania. The location errors for the Lord Howe Island sites are about 130m. The Lord Howe Island South site is shown in the water which is unlikely to be correct! It's not clear how much of the location error is in the coordinate transformation and the lack of precision in the lat/long, and how much is actual location inaccuracy.
• AM transmitters are typically not a single transmitter tower, they are more usually two towers with a horizontal antenna wire between them (and consequently horizontal polarisation), and the antenna wire is about 100-150m long. The "tower" shown by rtv2kml is usually located near the midpoint of the antenna wire, between its two physical towers. AM transmitter towers are often much narrower than TV broadcast towers, and can often be best seen by their shadow.