See how far a transmitter is likely to reach before you commit to a site. Real terrain, real land cover, and the contours Ofcom plans to. Free to use, with nothing to install.
A church tower, a block of flats or the hill outside town. Plot each one at the same power and see which delivers the coverage you are after.
FM is drawn at 64 and 54 dBµV/m, DAB at 63 dBµV/m. These are the field strengths Ofcom uses when it describes a service area.
Drop a pin on the map, enter the antenna height and power, and the map is usually ready in under a minute. Save it, download it, share it.
There is no password. We email you a link, you click it, and you are in.
Place a pin on the map or type in the latitude and longitude. Save as many candidate sites as you like.
Choose FM or DAB, enter the antenna height above ground and the power, and the map is calculated on our server. Change the figures and plot again as often as you need.
The prediction runs over Ordnance Survey terrain for the whole of Great Britain, with land cover from the European Space Agency so that towns and woodland attenuate the signal the way they do in practice. The propagation model follows the ITU recommendations Ofcom's own planning is based on, and has been fitted against published Ofcom coverage maps.
Each map is stamped with the position, height, power and date it was made with, so a saved image always says what it is a picture of.
Coverage is for Great Britain only, and power is limited to 500 W for FM and 2000 W for DAB (Ofcom) and 2000 W for DAB (EBU/ITU) in this free version.
This tool gives a close approximation of the modelling Ofcom uses, not an exact match. It is good enough to compare candidate transmitter sites and see which is likely to deliver the coverage you want. It will not tell you whether a frequency is available, and it does not account for interference from other stations, which in practice affects real coverage far more than any difference between this model and Ofcom's. Final coverage and frequency allocation are matters for Ofcom.
It answers "how far does this reach", and it answers it well enough to choose between sites. It is not the tool for deciding whether one particular address will receive you.
Maxxwave builds and operates broadcast and radio communications networks, including small-scale DAB multiplexes across the Midlands. This tool is the one we wanted when planning our own sites, offered free to anyone planning a radio service.
It takes about two minutes from entering your email address to seeing a coverage map.
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