Click the launch binder badge above open and run RStudio in your browser (CTRL/CMD + click for new tab), provided courtesy of mybinder.org. It may take a moment to build and open.

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Load functionality

With RStudio operational, load the viewshed generating function with:

source("R/motus_viewshed.R")

Find the coordinates of your proposed Motus station

If you don't know them already, use a map service (e.g., Google Maps) to find the geographic coordinates of your proposed station (latitude and longitude, in decimal degrees). This will be provided to the motus_viewshed function as a vector of the form c(latitude, longitude). Here we illustrate using the coordinates of the Motus station at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman, NC.

Estimate the height of the receiving antennas when installed

Estimate the height of the antennas, in meters, at the existing/proposed station. You can also leave this at the default value (ht = 0), to get a sense of how high antennas may need to be installed based on the surrounding landscape. Here, we use the installed height of the antennas (6 meters).

Execute the viewshed function

Pass these parameters to the motus_viewshed function, and voila, a fully interactive viewshed for your inspection (note, the image below is not interactive on Github):

motus_viewshed(coords = c(35.196986, -82.873250), ht = 6)

If you're doing many of these, there's an abbreviated version mv() that's easier to type and copy-paste coordinates into. Here's the same viewshed using the abbreviated version:

mv(35.196986, -82.873250, 6)