Martha Huizenga wrote: > You can do a look up using http://www.batchgeocode.com/ which is free. I > thought last year this gave me census tracts, but I must be wrong > because this year, it only gives me lat and long. I wonder if these can > then be translated into census tracts?
Yes, but not easily. You can get from the Census Bureau a big giant database detailing the borders of every census tract. Thing is, census tracts are all funny-shaped. Each "tract" is a list of points, describing the edges of the tract. If a tract were perfectly square, you'd only need four points (each of its four corners), and you then simply connect-the-dots to see the edges of the tract. Unfortunately, many of these tracts have ten or more points describing their edges. You can put all these points into a big database, and with a bit of fancy math identify the tract that any given point belongs to. (Sounds like this is basically what Matt Larsen did.) If you're only doing this for, say, FCC 477 requirements, and only have a few hundred points to map, it's probably easier and cheaper to just outsource the project than to write/buy the software you'd need to do it yourself. Once you do it (regardless of how it gets done), save the results. That way, the next time you have to send in FCC 477, you'll only have to worry about your new subscribers, anyone who moved, and removing anyone who's left your service. That's probably a small fraction of the work involved in doing it all from scratch. (Sometime in late 2010, or 2011, after the 2010 Census, they'll re-draw all the tracts and we'll have to do it all over again, but then we'll be all set for ten years.) David Smith MVN.net -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
