The station-info program searches for and displays AM, FM, and TV station entries from databases supplied by the US Federal Communications Commission ('the FCC'). The station-info program provides many ways of selecting a collection of stations for display, and several criteria by which these stations can be sorted. Detailed information on each station is available, including an antenna radiation pattern, ownership information, and whatever else seems useful.
There are three interfaces provided: a graphical user interface developed using the Gnome and Gtk widget libraries; a text-based interface that just writes the results of a single query to stdout; and a web interface that makes this information available using a standard web server and browser.
The station-info program requires approximately 20 MB of data files. The station-info-db-fetch program can be used to retrieve these files from the FCC web site and place them in the ${prefix}/share/station-info directory (normally /usr/local/share/station-info). This download can take anywhere from a few minutes over a broadband connection to a couple of hours if you're behind a slow modem line.
There are several programs built as part of the station-info package. Only three of these are of any use to "normal users". The others are either for development purposes, or for the internal use of the other programs.
- station-info: This is the main program in the station-info package. It provides a graphical user interface to the station information database access routines. It uses the Gnome toolkit, and will not be built if these libraries are not available.
- station-info-cli: This program provides a command-line driven interface to the station information database access routines that generates a text-based display of the search results. This program is used primarily to provide the information that is displayed on the station information web pages.
- station-info-db-fetch: This program will fetch a set of database files from the FCC and elsewhere, and will generate several ancillary files that are used by the previous two programs. This is run when the station-info package is first installed, and can be run subsequently to refresh the database files.
- station-info-call-loc: Used by the station-info-db-fetch program to generate a file containing the location of all stations by call sign. This allows a station call sign to be entered in the search location field.
- station-info-gen-index: Used by the station-info-db-fetch program to generate station location index files that are used to speed searches for stations within a given radius of a search location.
- station-info-pattern: Used by the details.cgi web interface to generate antenna radiation plots.