Richford Area Cellular Coverage Charts

  The author of this article can be contacted at richard@heurtley.com.

Cellular telephone coverage in Richford, Vermont is spotty at best. The cell providers' main antennas are on Jay Peak, the highest mountain in the area, but the mountainous Richford Village watershed area blocks the signal for most of Richford.

I wrote a computer program to calculate line-of-sight coverage areas for different potential antenna locations in and around Richford. The program corrects for earth curvature and atmospheric refraction with a K value of 4/3.

The elevation data and background imagery came from the U.S. Geological Survey:

http://seamless.usgs.gov

The town boundaries came from the Vermont Center for Geographic Information:

http://www.vcgi.org

The program assumes the cell towers are 30 meters tall and that the cell phone is only one meter above the ground. The maximum range of the cell towers is set to 10 miles.

The program can calculate the combined coverage for multiple cell towers. If a cell tower is included in a coverage chart then the tower is said to be "participating". Otherwise the tower is said to be "not participating".

The charts are color-coded as follows:

Color Meaning
Grayscale Terrain that has no coverage.
Green Terrain that is close to the nearest participating tower.
Yellow Terrain that is around half the maximum range (5 miles) to the nearest participating tower.
Red Terrain that is near the maximum range (10 miles) to the nearest participating tower.
Light blue dots Participating towers.
Blue dots Non-participating towers.
Dark blue dots The author's house, neighbors, and other interesting points.

The following antenna sites were charted:

Carpenter Hill A large centrally located hill.
Guilmette Jody Guilmette's off-grid hunting cabin.
Guilmette 2 Another good antenna site on Jody's lot.
Hardwood Hill A large hill convenient to the Village.
Jay Peak Richford's current main cell phone access.
Reservoir Hill A hill in the Village.
Snider A site convenient to South Richford.
Town Hall Hill The small hill behind the Town Hall in the Village.

In addition there are Peaks 1-8 for other unnamed high points.

The following 844x654 709KB chart has all the points labeled:

The charts were rendered in three sizes as follows:

  Dimensions Size Contour lines
Small 478x512 450KB 400m/100m
Medium 956x1024 1.5MB 200m/50m
Large 1913x2048 5MB 100m/25m

Single Site Charts

Richford's current cellular coverage is indicated by the Jay Peak chart.

Carpenter Hill

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Guilmette

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Guilmette 2

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Hardwood Hill

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Large
Jay Peak

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Large
Reservoir Hill

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Large
Snider

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Large
Town Hall Hill

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Large
Peak 1

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Peak 2

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Peak 3

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Peak 4

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Peak 5

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Peak 6

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Peak 7

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Peak 8

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Large
    

Multiple Site Charts

The "Best Four" chart shows the combined coverage for the four antenna sites that provide the maximum U.S. coverage. Unfortunately the peaks are remote and difficult to get to and coverage in the Village and on Route 105 is still spotty.

The "Easy Four" chart shows the combined coverage for four antenna sites with existing access and/or power.

Neither of these charts includes the current coverage from Jay Peak.

Best Four

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Medium
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Easy Four

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Large

Updates:

2007-10-15: Added multiple antenna charts
2007-10-01: First posted

Entire contents copyright © 2007, Richard Heurtley. All rights reserved.