Mobile phone towers too tall

[G7IZU]

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ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Description of the issue:

Mobile phone masts in cities appear to be unrealistically tall, ie. 50-100m tall, compared to 10-15m in reality.
ICAO, coordinates, or specific location:
Example mast in attached picture is near to coord: 50ø23’27"N, 4ø07’36"W.

[PC Only] Did you remove all your community mods/add-ons? If yes, are you still experiencing the issue?

No community addons installed

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)?

Everytime

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Observe scenery

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

1. Lauched simulator and flew over scenery

YOUR SETTINGS

If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.

What peripherals are you using, if relevant:

Not relevant

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?

No

[PC, MSFS 2020 Only] Are you using DX11 or DX12?

[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?

MEDIA

Please add a screenshot or video of the issue occurring.

[END OF FIRST USER REPORT]

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[PuffinFlight]

Hi. Thanks for the report. I’ll fix the antenna you mentioned.
Why some masts are taller than they should? Usually we have no additional data, just coordinates. Based only on that it’s hard to estimate what size is the antenna. It can be 15, it can be 50m. We take into account larger cities and any possible data that is available to us. We also checked tens of thousands of masts that are around airports.

But because there are hundred of thousands of antennas around the world, some situations like this will occur.
What can we do about it? Put every report like yours into our data and check and fix these places manually.
Additionally I’ll try to refine maximum height values for cities, and take a look around your area, cause I see many 5G masts and they are indeed very small. Maybe I’ll even refine UK city areas default values cause I think you have the most amount of these small towers around.

Thanks again for the report.

[G7IZU]

Thank you, your work is very much appreciated and it helps create a much more realistic environment.

For information, in the UK there is a general rule that planning permission is not required for commercial radio masts of 15m or less, so the majority tend to be around 15m in height. Masts in rural areas tend to be taller as they’re less likely to be opposed in council planning.

Carry on the great work!
Andy.

[PuffinFlight]

Ha, that might be the reason for so many tiny 5G masts in cities. Interesting. I’ll add a model for this type of tower so we can utilise the manual data we have for them (we marked 5g masts where they were checked manually) so it might help too.
sadly I have no release schedule to announce so it’s hard to tell when any of the thing I work on make into the sim.