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Scope & Status

Out of scope

Explicitly excluded, so expectations stay defensible in front of a government or donor reviewer:

  • Rain attenuation and frequency-band selection — a first-order decision in the tropics, and not resolvable with geometry alone.
  • Real anomalous propagation (ducting, measured refractivity gradients) — only the effective earth-radius factor k is parameterized.
  • Sea clutter, ground clutter, RF interference, spectrum compatibility.
  • Quantitative precipitation estimation, nowcasting, radar data processing.
  • Tower structure, radome, wind load, electrical resilience.
  • Cost, lifecycle, staffing.

This toolkit covers roughly 15% of a full siting study.

Status

Early scaffolding. Per the project plan, the analysis engine (core/) was developed and validated in a notebook first — the critical path for the originating Jamaica field report — with core/ and processing/ (the QGIS plugin wrapper: Evaluate, Discover, Network, Robustness matrix) following afterward. All four Processing algorithms are implemented; QGIS Plugin Manager packaging/publication has not happened yet (metadata.txt: experimental=True).

See Plan_Tecnico_Radar_Siting_Toolkit.md (repository root) for the full technical plan, phase breakdown, and the reasoning behind each design decision referenced throughout this documentation.

Testing

tests/ covers every core/ module (pytest, configured via pytest.ini with pythonpath = .). notebooks/fase0_motor_horizonte_bech.ipynb validates the engine against wradlib on the real Jamaica radar site and DEM data (Nivel 2 validation, section 7 of the plan) — wradlib is a dev/notebook-only dependency (requirements-dev.txt), never a plugin runtime dependency.

pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest

License

GPL v2 or later (LICENSE) — the de facto requirement for QGIS plugins.