New HAAT Tool, LMSBOT fixes for weekend grants and federal holidays

Over the Washington’s Birthday federal holiday weekend, REC has made the following system changes and fixes.

NEW – HAAT/Elevation/ERP Tool
https://recnet.com/haat

This new Toybox tool interfaces with the FCC’s Contour API to replicate the functions of the FCC’s legacy HAAT and FM Power tools.  Using the new REC HAAT tool, you can enter in (NAD83) geographic coordinates and either a height above mean sea level or a height above ground level (which the FCC’s HAAT tool does not support) to get the overall HAAT and the HAAT along the cardinal radials (you can select 8, 12, 36, 72 or 360 radials).  The tool will also return the elevation of the site.  NED1, NED2 (for Alaska) and GLOBE30 terrain is supported. (The FCC now uses NED1 in their systems where available).

An eLMS interface has been added to allow for external applications, such as FCCdata pre-fill in the entries based on an LMS application key.

If 12 cardinal radials are selected, the tool will also show the ERP limits for non-fill-in FM translators for directional antennas as well as the maximum ERP allowed for nondirectional non-fill-in FM translator facilities.

You may also optionally select an FM (or LPFM) service class to determine the maximum ERP at that particular HAAT (thus eliminating the need to visit the FCC’s FM Power site to get this information). 

LMSBOT & eLMS – Weekend Actions taken by FCC

We have fixed an issue in the LMSBOT Parser and eLMS systems that were ignoring any action (such as a grant or dismissal) that took place on what should be a non-work day at the FCC.  This is an issue that was not prevalent until the recent NCE window and in the current culture of remote working where we started to see grants take place on Saturdays.  Unlike applications filed over the weekend, which LMSBOT & eLMS support where the status date is the next business day, the FCC actions taking place on the weekend were given a status date of the previous business day. In the past, LMSBOT and eLMS never anticipated this type of action.  We will now anticipate actions taken over the weekend with the previous business day as the status date.  LMSBOT does operate once every 20 minutes over the weekend.

LMSBOT – Federal Holidays

We have converted the method for handling federal holidays in LMSBOT from hard coding to table driven.  Since the previous change in the structure of LMSBOT due to the way that the FCC handles the LMS public view system, yearly updates on Federal holidays had to be done in 9 different programs.  This modification places all federal holidays in the database, which is called by the LMSBOT programs.  This also allows for us to make “on the fly” changes to support emergency office closures and additional Federal holidays created by Executive Order.

FCCdata – FM HAAT requests

On FCC FM engineering records when “Compute HAAT” is clicked, eLMS supported engineering records will now access the new REC HAAT/Elevation Toybox app. Non-eLMS records will still use the legacy FCC HAAT tool on the link.

ABOUT LMSBOT
LMSBOT is an REC program that interfaces with the FCC’s LMS Public View website in order to obtain real time information on all broadcast application activity supported by LMS.  LMSBOT then compares the current listing data received with the previous time it collected data to look for changes.  Changes that involve eLMS supported applications are then sent to the appropriate eLMS parser that will read the FCC application and write the data to the eLMS database, which then updates the information in FCCdata and other REC systems.  Data from LMSBOT (and CDBSBOT) drives the information that is viewed on FCC.today.  LMSBOT operates every 10 minutes during business hours, every 15 minutes on weekday evenings and overnight and every 20 minutes on weekends.