Agreed. The example you provided is actually in a better state than most of these nodes are currently—it’s in the correct location, it’s clear that it is a communication facility of some sort (that currently or formerly broadcasted TV/radio signals), the potential operators are actually listed as operators (rather than names), and it has some information regarding its construction type. By my numbers, there are somewhere around 10,000 of these nodes remaining in some form.
And without doing the research into FCC records, I suspect that the list of broadcasters is substantially out of date. Researching the current data from the FCC and associating the broadcast antennas with physical structures is not simple. This is not a task for beginner mappers.
Absolutely. Some more things to consider here:
- Although radio/TV operators need to be registered with the FCC to broadcast on each site, mobile operators (which operate significantly more communication masts than radio/TV operators, combined) do not need to. Unless you can do a site survey, it’s impossible to know which operator is actually on the site. And even if a site survey is done, unless you’re familiar with the equipment (or all the equipment is labeled, which isn’t necessarily all that likely), it may not be possible to identify the operator.
- Even if a broadcaster (mobile/radio/TV) is no longer active, it’s not uncommon for the site to retain the abandoned antennas and base station equipment.
What would be better is if we were to map the mast structure and each antenna as a separate feature within OSM.
Again, agreed.
Minh has proposed a way to do this by splitting the structure and antennas into individual features. That’s particularly important for large broadcast structures that host multiple broadcast antennas for separate broadcasters.
In my opinion, this is already in practice by some importers and can be implied from the documentation (to some extent)—every communication mast should inherently have at least one related broadcast antenna. I fully support that concept, but I don’t believe it is what he is proposing.
What he is proposing is the ability to map communication masts—which in the vast majority of cases (a) correspond more closely with nodes in the real world and (b) are better handled as nodes in OSM—as areas based on some fringe showcased examples (that would probably be better handled by mapping under a different tag) and a number of incorrectly mapped sites.
I’m not at all surprised that there is already a sizable (although somewhat insignificant, in this case) number of incorrectly mapped sites, as we’ve all already laid out, and in my opinion, allowing mapping as an area adds significantly more ambiguity about how to map objects with a tag that is already a mess.
Moreover, crowding a whole bunch of antenna nodes around an object doesn’t resolve the main issue at hand and why the tag is a mess in the first place—editors finding it difficult to relate multiple broadcasters as separate objects on a single communication mast and, without sufficient documentation guiding them on how to handle the situation, combining nodes to simplify, as it (a) more closely resembles what can easily be observed (one communication mast) and (b) matches the documentation.
The documentation needs to be more clear as to the close but separate relationship between the physical structure and the broadcast equipment attached to it, suggest that it is common for there to be multiple broadcasters with separate equipment on a single mast, and then provide guidance on how to properly map that with some sort of relation (namely, the way @dieterdreist has proposed) rather than conflate for the sake of convenience and consistency (myself included).