ISSUE:
Not all LMS application listings are appearing for TV stations, including the currently licensed facility. Some older (CDBS) engineering records were showing as current and were on the default display. In the Application History, multiple applications are showing with a yellow background (those that were not directly selected). Long loading time on maps.
ROOT CAUSE:
Various coding issues and the nature of mapping within the REC universe.
RESOLUTION:
Since the deployment of eLMS, REC uses a single application list that merges applications received from three different sources (CDBS legacy, LMS and eLMS supported) into a single file. The programs used to merge television listings was not functioning properly. Since not all TV applications are supported by eLMS, we had to rebuild the program that is used to merge CDBS and LMS TV applications that are not supported by eLMS into the eLMS applicaiton lists. This program seems to be now working correctly. This new program also resolves the issues with CDBS engineering applications showing as current records even if they had been replaced by subsequent LMS application activity. We are still aware of some display issues, especially around directional antennas in the TV service and we are looking into this as a different project.
We have resolved the coding issue that was causing multiple facilities to appear in yellow. By design, the yellow background should only show when a specific application is selected in the engineering section.
Mapping: We have three methods of getting maps into FCCdata. This includes using cached data, going to the FCC's mapping API or going to the FCC's HAAT API and calculating distances to contours locally. The latter two are slow processes and at times, if an API fails, we will not be able to get the information. eLMS currently does not support cached antenna pattern data for TV stations as eLMS does not support these applications. In the future, we may modify code to allow cached TV antenna pattern data to appear in eLMS even if we are not yet supporting engineering applications. This will not provide the data in real time, but it least it will have a place to be stored and be there for any future activity to incorporate TV into eLMS. We are going to tentatively schedule a mass run during the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend to get mapping data from the FCC. The data will be for the noise limited contours only as those are similar to the former "grade B" contours of analog TV stations. There is no current plan in place to bring full TV records into eLMS, but it is not off of our radar.
A WORD ABOUT TESTING:
Because of limited resources and the wide possibilities of different situations, we are not able to test each and every situation so at times, even though something may be considered as "fixed", it may be broken in a certain circumstance. Trouble reporting from our users helps address those "one off" situations and we thank everyone who has submitted trouble reports in the past and we encourage you to report them in the future.
