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Hi again. I am happy to announce that the TV Station Add-On for FreqFinder is very nearly ready for primetime!

Features include:

- Look up station data for your current location (determined by gps, cell, or wifi) or for any location in the US

- Relate station data to any specific location for approximation of the interference caused by TV transmitters at that location

- Relate station data to multiple locations simultaneously for a "worst case scenario" estimate

- Station data for the selected areas stays on your device for offline use

- Sort TV stations by name, channel, and estimated field strength

- Filter TV stations by license status and by the channels affecting your current transmitter list (fully customizable filtering to be added in the future)

- Station transmitter detail screen featuring a map view of the station's polar pattern

- Estimated field strength calculation provided directly by the FCC

- Location Profiles allow for multiple location configurations

- Easy map search functionality allows fast finding of locations by address

The add-on will be an in-app purchase costing $15. I am going to release it early (before it is available for purchase) and extend the preview time until the end of October to give everyone a chance to play. Soon after this update, the in-app purchase will be available, extending the functionality indefinitely. After October, the preview will expire and the add-on will have to be purchased in order to access any station data.

I'm sorry to say that for the moment, the v2.0 will only be available for iPhone users. The Android preview will continue to be available until I make the complete add-on available to Android users.

*Current FreqFinder users: the FCC has changed the format of their TV data. This update is required to properly receive FCC data. Currently, FCC data is only downloaded upon major location changes (>20 miles) and fresh installs. An update for Android is already on the app store. The iPhone update will be available as soon as Apple approves the update. Thank you for your patience.

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The odd thing is that it was freqs I had in there for a while. I was going to retune one mic, so I had it open. I'll update, but I am switching to the next iPhone ASAP, so hopefully this will never happen again.

Thanks for the app, incredibly useful in the field. Blew some more minds by using LectroRM to put everyone to sleep during lunch. :)

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The coolest thing to me is going to a specific channel and having a button at the bottom to bring up LectroRM to change the frequency -- from within FreqFinder! That's a stroke of genius.

Great work. I would suggest adding an "I" screen for Info about the app and designer, which quite a few other apps have.

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Hey, anyone who can provide me with government maintained online access to terrestrial television transmission data for their country would seriously help me expand the add-on into other countries.

For anyone wondering, I would be happy to expand the TVDB add-on to include other countries (ie, the one in-app purchase for all countries), as long as the app can access that country's database by itself.

The only reason I might make any particular country a separate in-app purchase would be if I had to serve the information myself. Then it would be on a subscription model (cost of maintaining a web server). Even then I wouldn't charge more than $1/month.

So, in other words: find me those government databases!

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Hey, anyone who can provide me with government maintained online access to terrestrial television transmission data for their country would seriously help me expand the add-on into other countries.

For anyone wondering, I would be happy to expand the TVDB add-on to include other countries (ie, the one in-app purchase for all countries), as long as the app can access that country's database by itself.

The only reason I might make any particular country a separate in-app purchase would be if I had to serve the information myself. Then it would be on a subscription model (cost of maintaining a web server). Even then I wouldn't charge more than $1/month.

So, in other words: find me those government databases!

http://www.apwpt.org/downloads/handoutfrequencies19032012f.pdf

http://www.apwpt.org/

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larsson, thanks for those links but that's not quite the idea for two reasons:

1. It lists legal ranges, but nothing of terrestrial television transmission.

2. It isn't government maintained. The data has to be provided by an authority to ensure that it is public domain and that it is as up to date as possible.

Version 2.0 of FreqFinder is now available for iPhone and I highly recommend downloading it as soon as possible to correct a change in the FCCs data format, as well as to try out the new features that will be a part of the add-on to be released soon.

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Will the later version let you enter a ZIP code and use the TV function? That way I can re-freq at home before I go on location.

I do like the new version. I am out of town and using it now.

Darrell

Yes, TV Preview in the new version allows you to set up Location Profiles with configurable locations based on any address you search for.

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Any chance you can include adding TV transmitters to the list of wireless units, as in Canatrans and Modulus systems? I work on a show that at times can have 4 Canatrans running. I can only assume that these bad boys can cause intermod issues, but have not experienced it yet. Thanks.

(null)

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I would like to add them, but I don't have experience with transmitters of such a large bandwidth (6 Mhz vs 200 kHz). I can try to extrapolate the findings for the narrower transmitters and provide an experimental algorithm for it though. I just can't do it as immediately as for more standard transmitters.

-James

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  • 2 weeks later...

I submitted iPhone FreqFinder 2.01 today with the following additions/changes:

- Support for iPhone 5 4" screens

- Allows users to purchase full access to the TV Database Add-on

- Fixes one or two oddities with the estimated field strength calculation of stations with 0 HAAT or 0 ERP

- Adds the ability to remove 7th order and 3 TX/3rd order products from the calculation. Doing so will grant access to more compatible channels at the cost of greater risk of intermodulation

- Bug fixes

I also want to warn people about iOS 6 maps. They are terrible not just from a user's stand point. They also currently take up at least 8x the memory that google maps does. This means that on older phones (3GS and 4 to some degree), the app will crash if maps are used a fair amount at any given time. This does not make the TVDB add-on unusable, but if it does crash, that's the reason why. No data or settings will get lost. It's just annoying.

That said, if you have an older phone (or use the maps app frequently), I highly recommend staying with iOS 5 for the time being. Apple is working on fixing maps. I'll continue to look for ways to make the app work stably as well.

-James

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  • 2 weeks later...

I ran into a hitch today: tried to use the app and it kept crashing on me because it had trouble figuring out my location. I finally got a stable 3G signal, ran the station finder first, and then it worked fine. Still a little buggy -- sometimes it just closes up quick. The scrolling between frequencies is also very slow.

But having said that: it worked, and I had no major issues coordinating 6 frequencies much of the day.

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This might be the best bang for my buck of gear that I have bought. I was day playing on a show with 2 sound kits sending to 3 or 4 cameras.

8 wireless mics (Lectro) for talent split between two blocks.

Both bags with Lectro camera hops. (so 4 channels of wireless there)

Lectro IFB. (2 channels of wireless)

14 channels of wireless (with spares on standby) may not be a huge deal, but we started to get, what we thought might be intermod, hits one day. This made it a LOT easier to figure out while we were rolling (and using LectroRM to retune). There is that fear that if I retune one mic, will it have a chain reaction with other channels. I had a feeling there was another source of wireless that was contributing to our issues, but I never nailed that down.

WARNING! I don't usually use SM transmitters as hops, but did on this "kit provided job". I changed a freq while somebody was potted up (we were not rolling), I had been listening to the troublesome mic, so I also retuned a hop channel. Oops. I personally use a Zaxcom hop, so I just wasn't thinking that this would happen... till it did.

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