Features
Everything a senior engineer would bring to the bench.
Sentinel RF is one product: cited answers from your own library, the engineering math done deterministically, the FCC licensing database on tap, and the controls a working operation needs. Here is the whole of it. If all you need is the licensing side, the FCC tools are also sold on their own as the Search & Watch tier.
Answers you can trust
Grounded in your documents, cited every time.
The whole product rests on one rule: no citation, no answer. Sentinel RF reads from what your operation actually owns, never from memory of what a radio might do.
Cited to the source
Every factual answer points to the exact document and page it came from, so a second-year tech can open the manual and confirm it before touching the bench.
Your library plus vetted references
Answers draw on the manuals, alignment procedures, and bulletins you upload, alongside a shared library of vetted public-domain references like FCC rules and band plans.
It tells you when it doesn't know
If the library doesn't cover the question, Sentinel RF says so rather than inventing a spec. It never answers a numeric spec or a procedure from memory.
Senior judgment, safety first
The experience is a senior RF engineer and master bench tech mentoring your team: practical, plain-spoken, and safety-conscious about RF exposure, tower work, and high voltage.
Asks instead of guessing
When it needs a measurement you haven't given it, it asks for the reading rather than assuming one, and it defers life-safety and public-safety system design to a licensed engineer.
Verify-against-revision reminders
Tune-up values always carry a reminder to check against the service manual revision for your serial range, the way a careful senior tech would.
Bench math, done right
The engineering math nobody wants to do by hand.
The arithmetic is never improvised. Thirty-one deterministic calculators run the numbers: checked, repeatable, and clean enough to show a customer. A catalog page in the app lists every one with an example question.
Terrain-aware coverage (Longley-Rice)
The Irregular Terrain Model the professionals use, at the reliability level you specify, with the terrain roughness measured from USGS elevation data around your actual site instead of guessed from a menu. Plus Hata, COST-231, and Egli for quick estimates.
Path studies over real terrain
Give it two coordinates and it pulls the actual USGS elevation profile between them, runs Longley-Rice point-to-point, and tells you line of sight or obstructed, the loss, and the margin.
Microwave path studies (backhaul)
A full fixed-microwave link budget between two sites: free space and gaseous loss, antenna gains, EIRP, receive signal, and fade margin, with Vigants-Barnett multipath and ITU-R P.530 rain availability worked out to the worst-month and annual percentages, and a side-view profile showing the direct ray, first Fresnel zone, and earth bulge.
Coverage radius and interference contours
How far a site actually talks: the distance where the predicted signal falls to the receiver threshold, at 50, 90, and 95 percent reliability. Thresholds in dBm or dBu, with an optional interference contour at a weaker threshold so you can see how far your signal reaches into co-channel territory.
Terrain-shaped contours, drawn on a map
The propagation map runs a Longley-Rice radial sweep over real USGS ground profiles, up to 360 radials, and draws the actual irregular coverage polygon: shorter into the ridge, longer down the valley, with forest and built-up clutter from land cover data figured in at the receive end.
Directional antenna patterns
Upload a pattern file (MSI Planet or NSMA) or give a beamwidth, point the boresight, set the tilt, and the contours and tile studies follow the pattern instead of assuming omni. Patterns live in a shared library for the whole operation.
TSB-88 tile reliability studies
The public-safety coverage-acceptance method: a uniform tile grid over the service area, a real Longley-Rice median for every tile, and the predicted area reliability against your target, using the channel performance criterion you enter from the TSB-88 revision you design against. Add interferers, co-channel or adjacent, with the receiver's adjacent-channel rejection applied.
Letterheaded study reports
Every propagation study, channel search, and TOWAIR screen prints or downloads as a PDF under your operation's name: parameters, results, the map, and the planning-study disclaimers, kept in a report history and ready to hand a customer or attach to a coordination request.
Intermodulation studies
Third and fifth order intermod against your site frequency list, so interference gets found on paper before it gets found on a complaint.
Path clearance and Fresnel zones
Zone radius, the 60% clearance rule, earth bulge, and the diffraction cost of that ridge or tree line near the path.
Site work: grounding and isolation
Ground rod resistance from soil and rod dimensions, and antenna-to-antenna isolation from vertical or horizontal separation for repeater planning.
Coverage reliability and receiver math
Fade margin to edge and area coverage percentages, receiver noise floor, sensitivity conversions, RF exposure per OET-65, VSWR, and ERP.
Units, tones, and the small stuff
Coax loss by cable type and run length, dBm/watts/microvolt conversions, PL and DPL tone tables, emission designator decoding, audio line levels, DC voltage-drop, and battery runtime.
FCC search
The FCC's licensing and tower databases, searchable in plain language.
Full, weekly-refreshed copies of the FCC Universal Licensing System and the Antenna Structure Registration database. Four dedicated search tools, plus in-chat lookups, so you never have to click through the FCC site mid-job.
ULS license search
Search the FCC license database by callsign, licensee, FRN, radio service, or frequency, and refine by status, state, county, city, ZIP, grant and expiration date, and buildout. Includes a coordinate-and-radius search plotted on a map.
ULS application search
Search recent and pending FCC license applications by callsign, applicant, FRN, file number, or location, filtered by radio service, status, purpose, frequency, ZIP, and action date, so you can see what is being filed before it becomes a license.
ASR registration search
Search the Antenna Structure Registration database by ASR number, owner, FAA study number, or location, with map pins and refine-by city, owner ZIP, status, and height in feet or meters. See who owns a structure, how tall it is, and what is registered near a site.
ASR application search
Search filed antenna-structure applications by file number, ASR number, applicant, FAA study number, or location, filtered by status, purpose, and city, so you see what is proposed or in process, not just what is already built.
Search on a map, near a site
Every search also runs as a coordinate-and-radius query, plotting licenses or structures on a map. Handy when you are planning a channel, checking for interference, or sizing up a site.
Street, satellite, and terrain views
Flip any map between street, satellite, and terrain base layers. Satellite shows what is really on the ground at a site; terrain shows the ridges a path has to clear. The map remembers which view you work in.
Channel search on a map
Pick a site and a band segment and get every in-use frequency with the nearest co-channel user pinned on the map, plus how busy the adjacent channels are at your channel step. Quiet candidates stand out before you go to coordination. Certified frequency coordination is still required; this is the homework that makes it smoother.
700/800 MHz channel allotments
The regional planning committee's channel allotments for the county at your site, pulled from the public CAPRAD planning database and cross-checked against active licenses in the FCC ULS, so you can see which allotted channels appear unassigned before you start the RPC conversation.
Microwave channel search (Part 101)
The fixed-microwave channel plan for a band (Lower and Upper 6, 11, 18, 23 GHz and more) screened against licensed paths near your site, so open channels stand out before the prior-coordination interference study that Part 101 requires.
FAA notification screening
A TOWAIR-style check for a proposed structure: height and nearby public-use airports and heliports screened against the FAA obstruction criteria, so you know before quoting a tower job whether an FAA filing is likely in the picture. A screening aid, not a determination.
Look it up mid-question
Ask for a callsign, licensee, or frequency right in the flow of a chat question, without leaving what you were doing.
Proactive monitoring
Set it once, and Sentinel RF watches the FCC data so you don't have to.
This is the proactive side: put licenses on a watch list for renewal alerts, and define an area to stay aware of new antenna structures and licenses inside it. Sentinel RF re-checks everything after each weekly FCC refresh and pushes what changed to one notification center and your inbox, months before a renewal bites or a new tower surprises you.
License watch list
Put your licenses, and your customers', on a watch list by callsign or FRN. Sentinel RF checks every one against each weekly FCC data refresh.
180, 90, and 30-day renewal alerts
Automatic expiration alerts at 180, 90, and 30 days out, delivered in the app and by email, the way a diligent office manager would catch them.
Watch an area for new antenna structures
Define an area and stay aware of new antenna-structure applications and grants inside it. A simple, weekly heads-up on what is being proposed or built nearby, useful for planning, coordination, and local awareness.
Watch new licenses near your frequency
Set an area and a frequency band, and get notified when a new license is granted or applied for nearby: the coordination and interference check a system operator actually needs.
Draw it, or upload a boundary
Define the area as a simple radius, a polygon you trace on the map, or a boundary you upload as GeoJSON or a shapefile, reprojected for you automatically.
One notification center
Renewal windows, expirations, status changes, and new-activity alerts collect in one place, so nothing depends on one person remembering to check.
Just the licensing side
Search & Watch, for organizations that hold licenses.
The FCC search and license watch above are also sold on their own, for the organizations that hold FCC licenses rather than service the radios: municipalities, utilities, public-safety agencies, schools, hospitals, and any business with call signs on file. Know what you hold, search the FCC database the easy way, watch your area, and never miss a renewal. Search & Watch includes the full FCC ULS and application search, the antenna structure registration and application search, the geographic area watches (tower activity and new licenses near a frequency), and the 180, 90, and 30-day license watch with a notification center. It does not include the cited answers, the document library, or the RF calculators, and you can move up to a full plan any time and keep your watchlists.
Your documents
A library that loads fast and keeps itself current.
Get your operation's knowledge in quickly, keep it fresh without babysitting, and read it without leaving the app.
Drag-and-drop bulk upload
Drop in a stack of PDFs at once and watch live processing status as each document is read, structured, and indexed.
In-app PDF viewer
Open the source document to the cited page without leaving Sentinel RF, so checking an answer takes seconds.
Email-in connector
Every operation gets a private ingest address. Forward a manufacturer bulletin once, set a mail rule, and new documents flow into your library automatically.
Deduplicated and announced
Ingested documents are deduplicated against what you already hold, and your admin is notified whenever something new is added.
A shared reference corpus
A curated set of public-domain references ships with every account, so useful ground exists on day one, before you upload a thing.
Watched-folder syncRoadmap
Point Sentinel RF at a Google Drive or OneDrive folder and have new files ingested automatically. On the roadmap, not yet available.
Built for the operation
Made for a working bench and a real team.
Fast to use with your hands full, and easy for an owner to run without living in the settings.
Press-and-hold voice input
Hold the mic button in the chat bar and talk. It works in every browser, so a tech with a probe in one hand can still ask a question.
Optional open-web fallback
For general or background questions, an optional open-web fallback can be turned on. It is clearly labeled and never used to answer a spec or a procedure.
Multi-seat teams with roles
Owner, admin, and member roles keep control where it belongs. Each person signs in with their own seat; credentials are never shared.
Self-serve billing and seats
Add or remove seats from the admin console with prorated changes previewed before you confirm, and manage billing from a self-serve portal.
Usage and audit visibility
See usage by seat and an audit log of who did what, so an owner can run the operation instead of running the software.
Per-operation isolation and export
Your documents stay isolated to your operation and are never used to answer another operation's questions. Export your data any time from the admin console.
Monitored and backed up
The platform is actively monitored for health and reliability, with automated offsite backups, so your library and history stay safe.
See it on your own manuals.
Bring a service manual and a real question from your bench. If it doesn't earn its seat in the first fifteen minutes, we'll tell you.