Comparative Coverage Area Analysis of Selected TV Stations in an Urban Environment in Nigeria

Abstract

Television broadcasting is one of the means of disseminating information to the public in every nation of the world. This work is aimed at comparing coverage areas of selected TV stations in an urban environment. In this work, two TV stations were considered for investigation and it involves the measurements of the field strength from these broadcasting stations. The field measurement took place in an urban propagation scenario in Abuja at 645.00MHz (station 1) and 698.00MHz (station 2). The measurements were taken for each TV station with a handheld RF field strength spectrum analyzer and a Garmin 72H GPS receiver. The field strength values were used to classify the environment under investigation into primary, secondary and fringe areas. Furthermore, signal strength coverage contour was created using ArcGIS 10.2 and overlaid on the digitized map of Abuja to show the extent of signal coverage exhibited by these TV stations in Abuja.The result form these research work shows that Television coverage in Abuja exhibited by these TV stations under investigation is insufficient as they may need antenna boosters.