GIS supporting the plan of BTS (base transceiver stations) for mobile network in urban context

In recent years the technological development in general and the spread on the territory of antennas for mobile phones urged a state of widespread public concern repeatedly verging the social alarm. The need for a greater territorial coverage of mobile telephone service, due to the continuous request of users and to the presence of more operators in the market, led an intensification of the installations that not only made to a progressive decrease the power radiated from individual installations, it also required that they be placed closer to homes with consequent concern of the population for their own health. It is known that for assessing the levels of electromagnetic field in a particular place or around a given source (thus assessing the potential risk for the population nearby living) should be campaigns to measure or apply the theoretical methods (analytical or numerical). The Municipality of Reggio Calabria in 2006 started a project having as its main purpose the development of a GIS (Geographic Information System), capable of "storing" the results of measurement campaigns and also to apply a theoretical model for developing scenarios of exposure to electromagnetic field. The aim is to assess whether the presence of fixed installations for cellular phone is compatible with the health of citizens, or if the values of exposure to electromagnetic fields produced by them are within the limits set by law. This was achieved through the implementation of a Geographical Information System able to manage, store, process all data (both alphanumeric that geographical) relating to devices GSM, GPRS, UMTS with also the possibility to update the database (Technical data characteristics antennas) and insert new installations. In addition to the management, GIS is able to calculate the electromagnetic field produced by the antennas. The SIT is therefore the final collector, performing in a single "container" the stacking phase and the monitoring of electromagnetic radiation (in operational band of GSM, GPRS, UMTS), and finally support the phases related to the remediation of areas with anomalous values of the electromagnetic field, thus supporting the planning phase of the distribution of antennas in urban context.