Adam Crain GIS 582 Fall 2012 Final Project Paper

Ideal Location for Cell Phone Tower Placement in Wilmington, North Carolina
Abstract: The goal for this assignment was to incorporate a few of the methods and practices that we have learned through out this semester and apply them to a site selection scenario. The scenario was to find suitable site locations for cell phone towers with in the Wilmington City limits. For this particular scenario we decided to incorporate elevation and land class continuous raster data sets as part of our selection process. Goals: There were two goals for this project. The first was to find as many suitable sites as possible that fell within our parameters. Once our final placement sites had been identified, we then wanted to find the best combination of three sites that provided the most coverage with minimal coverage over lap. The idea behind this scenario was placing towers with efficiency in mind. Study Site: Wilmington is located in New Hanover County which is found in the south eastern tip of the state. Being a coastal county much of the area is relatively flat with elevation ranges from -7 feet to 74 feet above sea level. A majority of the higher elevations can be found with in the Wilmington City limits. Wilmington is the largest municipality found in the county containing approximately 43% of the parcel lots. Data: All of the data used for this project was downloaded from the New Hanover County GIS website. We utilized two raster data-sets, two vector data-sets, and a database file. New Hanover County parcels Polygon shapefile Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic Geographic Coordinate System: NAD 1983 StatePlane North Carolina FIPS 3200 feet Wilmington City Limits Polygon shapefile - Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic Geographic Coordinate System: NAD 1983 StatePlane North Carolina FIPS 3200 feet New Hanover County tax data .DBF file Elevation Raster Produced from Lidar 20x20 meter cell size Projection: Lamber Conformal Conic - Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic Geographic Coordinate System: NAD 1983 StatePlane North Carolina FIPS 3200 feet Land Cover Raster GeoTIFF 30x30 meter cell size - Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic Geographic Coordinate System: NAD 1983 StatePlane North Carolina FIPS 3200 feet

Methods: The first step in our process was to determine some realistic and common sense parameters for our placement sites. Cellular communication towers by themselves do not have a one size fits all configurations. They can range in height from a few feet to hundreds of feet. Broadcast ranges can reach a few feet to tens of miles. A towers range depends on several factors including but not limited to impeding objects, elevation, broadcast frequency, and power supply. While cellular towers maybe be flexible with their configurations, local zoning ordinances for communication towers are not. Wilmington had specific regulations for their placement which we included in our site selection parameters. The City of Wilmington had the following restrictions: There is a maximum structure height of 150 feet All structures must have setbacks equal to 100% of structure height No tower maybe located within 1500 feet of another tower

To derive a reasonable tower height we needed to estimate the average height of the buildings in Wilmington. Working from our knowledge of local zoning ordinances and our parcel data we determined the following: Approximately 80% of the city parcels had an area of 22,500 square feet or less Of those 80%, the average lot size was 10,400 square feet Based on local zoning regulations requiring set back of 100% of structure height, we could estimate the average building height to be approximately 35 feet. Based on these findings we decided on a tower height of 75 feet to provided ample clearance A 75 foot tower would require a lot size of 22,500 square feet or larger

The following parameters where chosen for our site selection process: Parcels must be vacant according to a tax building value of $0.00 Parcels must be zoned for Commercial or Residential use No Government, Education, Parks, or Protected lands Parcels must not be located in a land cover area of Water, Wetland, or Cultivated Crop Must allow for a tower height of 75 feet of more based on local zoning regulations Parcels must have an elevation of 40 feet or more Selection sites must be separated by 1500 feet or more from another selection site

Once our parameters were in place we began to filter out our data through the following process. Isolated New Hanover County parcels to with in Wilmington City limits Limited parcels to building values of $0.00, and zoned for Commercial or Residential use using tax data joined to our parcels Selected out parcels with lot sizes greater than or equal to 22,500 square feet Applied zonal statistics to assign elevation values to our vacant parcels, then select out elevations greater than 40 feet Applied zonal statistics to assign land cover values to our vacant parcels, then remove parcels with values equal to water, wetland, and cultivated crops We then buffered parcels centroids by 1500 feet and selected out the combination which allowed for the most sites possible with out overlapping. Results: After completing the previously listed process we ended up with the following results.

Our site selection process resulted in 16 possible parcels for tower placement. After reviewing our data the and map above it was clear that elevation was our most limiting factor. By requiring an elevation of greater than 40 feet virtually eliminated all possible sites on the eastern side of town. The majority of our sites followed the high elevation ridge that moves through the center of town in a northeast to southwest direction. All of our final sites were zoned for commercial use and had lot sizes between 23,892 and 599,805 square feet. For our second goal we ran viewshed analysis on combinations of 3 of our final 16 sites. We set our tower heights to 75 feet as previously discussed, and tested broadcast ranges between 1 and 3 miles. After several runs we produced the following results.

We found that towers 2, 3, and 9 set at a height of 75 feet and with a broadcast range of 3 miles would provide the most coverage with the least amount of coverage overlap. Our viewshed analysis showed that this combination produced a coverage area of 41% of the city with a 0.68% area of coverage overlap.

Conclusion: After performing our site selection process with our desired parameters we came to the following conclusions. With high elevations as a parameter, the east side of town will be under represented by possible placement sites and therefore could lack coverage. Using zoning as a parameter eliminated many of the parcels that were located in undesirable land covers. To provide improved coverage, more than three towers is recommended and placed in areas with lower elevations. Do to Wilmington's relatively flat landscape and lack of extremely tall structures, cellular towers should have little interference in providing adequate coverage.

References: 1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_site 2)http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/ 3)Wilmington Land Development Code , Article 6, Section 18-259, Page 12, Communication Facilities http://www.wilmingtonnc.gov/Portals/0/documents/Development%20Services/Plans%20and %20Documents/LDC/EntireLDC.pdf 4)Moore, Roy. "Disguising Cellular Towers And Antennae." American City & County 112.9 (1997): 39. Computers & Applied Sciences Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. 5)Ostroumov, B., R. Khanin, and S. Ostroumov. "Design Experience With Foundations Of Towers For Cellular-Communication Antennas Under Various Engineering And Geologic Conditions." Soil Mechanics & Foundation Engineering 45.2 (2008): 53-58. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2012 6)O'Shea, Dan. "Tower Power." Telephony 233.20 (1997): 25. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. 7)http://www.nhcgov.com/pages/GISData.aspx

Bonus Figures: Figure1: Map displaying the top 16 site locations as parcels, symbolized by elevation ranking

Figure 2: Query to find number of lots with areas of less than 22,500 square feet

Figure 3: Statistics of the 80% of city parcels that were less than 22,500 square feet

Figure 4: Top 16 site locations in relation to land cover values