I've made some upgrades to the RabbitEars Signal Search Map.
First, I've upgraded the entire RabbitEars site from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.4, which should improve performance and security. This was quite a slog since most of the site's database query code was written with the older "mysql_*" functions rather than the newer "mysqli_*" functions. I've not found anything broken, but let me know if you do.
Second, I've added two features that had been requested. The receive height above sea level is now given next to the receive height above ground, and there is now an option to hide stations that are believed to the be off the air. I've also rearranged some of the rows a bit, having swapped the link to the instructions to the top since a lot of people were missing it, and moving the search coordinates to be above the date and time rather than below.
There are two additional features in the works.
Already done from a code perspective but not sure how to get it into the UI, I've written a feature that will let you cut off the list of retrieved rows from the search results by field strength. The use case is if you are sorting by RF Channel and want to show only signals that are above the "Bad" region, you would put in 41 and get out only a list of stations that are "Poor" or better. It should make the results tidier in those cases.
The second is a long-discussed feature to expand the search distance from within a completed study. I worked out how to do it without potentially leaking the coordinates, and have actually written the code for it. It is designed to filter out records found in the existing study so they don't get rerun, saving resources. This code is mostly done as well, and I've figured out how to get it into the UI (the search distance value will be replaced with a drop-down menu); the problem is how to make it match up rows properly if the database has changed, as it does each day. My initial thought was to make it so you could only do the updates before the database updates, but that update happens in the 6:30-7:00AM ET time frame each day, and could result in a case where someone posts a result late at night, particularly on the west coast, and then by the time people are reviewing it the next day, it's impossible to expand the result. It mostly works properly, as long as the rows haven't changed. But if a station files a license to cover, for example, you could end up with two identical rows in a result. Maybe it's just not a big deal, but I'd rather not confuse people with it if I can help it. I think it needs some more attention before I make it public.
Anyway, thoughts and opinions and bug reports appreciated.
- Trip
