End of the Spectrum Map? Part deux…

So for the second time, the FCC has stopped updating my data source (the first time was the Spectrum Dashboard, and then I rewrote my scripts to parse the License View data dump).

I’m loathe to rewrite it for a third time (using the direct data dumps from the ULS) mostly because I’m too busy. With 50 hour work weeks becoming more frequent, a wife, and friends I don’t get to see much, I don’t have a lot of free time anymore (when I first wrote this, I was single, all my friends were married, and had tremendous amounts of free time). Its one thing to fire up a python script once every two weeks to download and update the data from the FCC, its another thing to have to dedicate 100+ hours to rewrite the back end from scratch (data processing, cleanup, normalization, store into a DB, generate static data files).

So I think this might be the end, if the FCC doesn’t update the License View dataset ever again. I could care less about their Spectrum Dashboard, that was a difficult tool to use productively. But the raw License View data was much easier to ingest and process – its way more valuable to the community. Lets hope this doesn’t fall on deaf ears.