Databases Rural Suburban

Define topographies and land usage with a pixel database for rural and/or suburban usage.

Motivation for Databases

Propagation of electromagnetic waves in large areas depends mainly on the topography and the land usage (clutter). The vector data of the individual buildings need not be considered in such scenarios. Scenarios where large areas are considered are called rural scenarios in WinProp. If an urban area is described by clutter data (instead of by individual buildings) is part of the area under consideration, it is still a rural scenario. If it is required to include vector data of individual buildings, you can define an urban scenario in WinProp and add topological data to describe the elevations.

Topography

For large scale computations, the topographical databases digital elevation models (DEM) are the most important as the topography has a significant influence on the propagation of electromagnetic waves. The topographical databases are often denoted as “terrain databases”. For topographical databases, a single database file has the extension .tdb (topo data binary). Draw topography in ProMan using the pixel modification tool.

The examples provided show topography databases for four different scenarios:
  • coastal area
  • Grand Canyon
  • hilly terrain
  • mountains
All the above topographical databases show the elevation in meters. In ProMan, the color pattern shows the height of the terrain at this particular pixel, while the legend shows the height for a given color in meters.

Clutter Morpho

Clutter databases are sometimes called “morpho” databases or “land usage” databases. They contain information about land usage at a given location. Clutter databases are based on pixel matrices. Each pixel defines the class of land usage for a given location (at the center of the pixel).

Conversion of topographical data from other file formats to the WinProp data format is possible with the converters integrated into ProMan. The corresponding topographic database is created after conversion in the .tbf file format. Similarly, the clutter database is created in the .mdb file format.

The examples provided show clutter databases for the following cities:
  • Berlin
  • Den Haag
  • Lisbon
  • Seoul
Different colors are used to indicate different land usage classes.