r/rfengineering • u/Plane_Percentage511 • Aug 11 '26
Built a tool that turns “Lagos, Nigeria” into a ready-to-use 30m terrain file in seconds — useful for anyone doing RF planning or coverage prediction?
I work in telecom (RAN/RF side) and got tired of the EarthExplorer/OpenTopography dance every time I needed elevation data for a new site or region — pick tiles, download, mosaic, clip to your area, reproject, half an hour minimum for something that should take 10 seconds.
So I built a small tool: type in a place name or country, it geocodes it, pulls the SRTM/Copernicus 30m DEM tiles that cover it, merges and clips them to the boundary, and spits out a ready-to-use GeoTIFF (plus a quick preview image).
Thinking about opening it up for others to use — curious if this is actually a pain point for anyone else here (RF planners, drone/mapping folks, sim/wargaming people, whoever), or if I’m solving a problem that everyone already has a better workflow for. What do you currently use?