Los Angeles may be the world’s entertainment capital, but it
is a difficult area to place television and radio antennas for
broadcasting. The metropolitan area spreads out from the Pacific
Ocean to Southern California’s upper and lower deserts — over
valleys, mountains, canyons and coastal plains. While this unique
geography offers something for everyone in terms of urban,
suburban, houseboat, small-town and even semi-rural living,
reception of television and radio signals can be problematic if
there is no line-of-sight to a transmitting antenna. The
challenge to broadcasters is clear in this perspective view from
the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission available online at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/srtm .

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission is a cooperative
project between NASA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency
(NIMA), and the German and Italian space agencies. More
information about the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission is
available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm .

More information about NIMA is available at
http://www.nima.mil/