Martin to Base Station (The Odyssey Part 2)

During my recent dealings with Three Mobile in search of a better signal it occurred to me that I've never seen a mobile phone base station or mast in or around Fair Oak. This probably means one or the other of two things: 1) I've seen plenty of them, but not realised what they are or 2) They're generally in out-of-the-way places I don't tend to go. Feeling in an inquisitive frame of mind, I determined to find out where the nearest base stations to home are located.

My starting point was Google, which turned up Ofcom's Site Finder - an online utility that allows you to enter a postcode, town or street name and displays the nearest base stations on a map. You can then click on each base station to reveal details - such as operator, type and frequency range - about each base station. The site is a bit old fashioned and clunky, but it revealed the following result:



The blue triangles in top left quadrant of the map are mobile phone base stations, the furthest right of which is apparently Three Mobile's 18-metre tall, UTMS macrocell transmitter operating at 2100 Mhz.

Switching to Google Maps, the calculated distance between home and the base station is about a mile if following the directions given, or half-a-mile as the crow flies. Odd, then, that the signal should be so weak at home.

Zooming in on the approximate location of the base station was not as revealing as I'd hoped. Instead of seeing the base station clearly defined, all that was visible were trees, fields and buildings:


View Larger Map

Although disappointing, this was not altogether unexpected. As readers may be aware, Google use several different sources for images depending on the level of zoom. Images at this resolution are generally taken from aerial photography which, given the expense, may not be updated very often, so the image could well pre-date the building of the base station. It might also be the case that the footprint of a base station is so small that it isn't readily identifiable from an aerial photograph.

What was more surprising was switching to Google's street view. A ~20 metre tall mast should tower over the surrounding landscape, a cluster of 5-6 of them, as shown on Ofcom's map, more so. So why, then, did street view show nothing more than houses, fields and trees?


View Larger Map

Something was definitely up, and it didn't seem to be mobile phone masts! Was Ofcom's map wrong? Was Google out of date? Had alien invaders stolen them and left a message "All your base are belong to us" in their place? The internet having only got me so far there was nothing for it but to dress up warm, stock up on provisions and venture into Deepest Darkest Fair Oak.