MIC API working notes

References: band plans · English source translations.

2026-09-17 — first operator probe

Separate exploratory spike. Start with JOSADA TELECOM: the existing Japan research has microwave routes we can compare with its public licence records. Include station classes beyond FX; the research describes some E-band links as land-mobile licences.

Questions for this pass:

• What does one operator's detailed response actually contain?
• Do JSON, CSV and XML contain the same records and values?
• What geography, frequency/emission/power structure, and counterpart information can we see directly?

The pasted transcript is a source of things to check, not verified API behaviour. No choice of maintained collector, storage model or pairing method yet. One-off probe code is under /tmp/japan_mic_probe. Raw responses, HTTP headers and the official documentation are retained in /data/brific/japan_mic/2026-09-17-josada-probe/.

Official API documentation: https://www.tele.soumu.go.jp/j/musen/webapi/index.htm

Requests and access

The web reader could not open the documentation. Direct curl with User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 received 403; the same page with the full UA below returned 200. API requests with that full UA also returned 200. This is the observed behaviour of these requests, not a general access requirement.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/140.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Small detailed queries, without frequency or geographic filters:

https://www.tele.soumu.go.jp/musen/list?ST=1&OW=FX&NA=JOSADA&OF=2&DA=1&DC=1&SC=1&MC=1
https://www.tele.soumu.go.jp/musen/list?ST=1&OW=ML&NA=JOSADA&OF=2&DA=1&DC=1&SC=1&MC=1

For each, also fetched OF=1 (CSV) and OF=3 (XML). Responses report lastUpdateDate=2026-09-16. FX returned 13 records; ML returned 6. All returned names identify ＪＯＳＡＤＡ　ＴＥＬＥＣＯＭ株式会社, corporate number 1010401114875 in the summary name. ASCII NA=JOSADA matched that name.

Omitting OW returned HTTP 400 / EQ00008, not an all-class result. Other classes and registration searches have not been probed; 19 is the FX+ML result count, not an established total for the operator.

The current official request specification is version 1.3.0, March 2025. It documents DC=1/2/3 as 100/500/10000 records, with 10000 restricted to DA=0. These limits were read, not load-tested. It also says MC was removed when encoding became uniformly UTF-8. The first queries above included the older MC parameter and succeeded; future probes can omit it. NA is a partial-name search.

JSON / CSV / XML comparison

Compared every returned record and field for both classes, preserving order and duplicates: 13 FX × 26 fields, and 6 ML × 26 fields. All three formats contained the same values after accounting for the following presentation differences:

• JSON has named listInfo and detailInfo objects, plus musenInformation.
• CSV has a first row containing update date and total count, followed by 26-column records without column headers, and a trailing blank row. Its parsed record values exactly match the JSON values in the XML's field order.
• In parsed JSON/CSV, radioSpec1 contains literal backslash-t and backslash-n separators, rather than an array of RF objects. XML uses padding spaces between RF columns. Newline representation also differs in location fields; comparison decoded literal backslash-n for XML/JSON location equality.
• Empty and masked values remain empty and masked in all three. No format exposed extra record fields in these samples.

This comparison covers these JOSADA FX and ML responses only.

What is visible in the FX sample

• All 13 records have emission 53M5D7W and either frequencies 6015/6135 MHz or 6275/6395 MHz. The same frequency pair occurs in several municipalities.
• listInfo.tdfkCd contains a Japanese place name, despite its code-like name. There are 10 distinct municipality/ward names across the 13 records.
• commPartner, identificationSignals, licenseNumber, and address are masked in every FX record. No coordinates or antenna fields appear in these responses. listInfo.no is the result position; no durable station identifier has been established from this sample.
• Each detailed radioEuipmentLocation contains the summary municipality, blank line, then 東京都新宿区 (Shinjuku). The meaning of that second place is still unexamined; do not treat it as the opposite endpoint.
• Multiple RF lines can repeat the same frequency with different powers. Susono even repeats identical frequency/emission/power lines. Preserve these for now; their equipment/link meaning has not been established.

Compact transcription (powers apply to both listed frequencies; order retained):

Both Inzai records have licenseDate=2026-08-07. That is the returned licence date, not an inferred construction or operating date. No links have been assigned from this table. The subsequently checked 6 GHz plan confirms the +260 MHz pairing for these 53.5 MHz emissions.

What is visible in the ML sample

Six land-mobile records, all showing Kōtō ward, licenseDate=2026-06-01, emission 2G00G7W, and 200 mW. Three list 74.625 GHz; three list 84.625 GHz. Within each frequency group, all returned fields other than result number are identical. This does not identify which records communicate with which.

commPartner is 免許人所属の陸上移動局 (land-mobile stations belonging to the licensee). The location field also contains 移動範囲 (movement area) and 関東総合通信局管内 (within the Kantō communications bureau's jurisdiction), although the separately named movementArea field is empty.

One-off versus maintained, for now

The format comparison and sample inspection are one-off scripts. This note is the maintained record of what was checked. No collector, database, deduplication rule, topology, or visualization design has been selected. The raw responses are kept outside Git so we can revisit the observations without another request.

2026-09-17 — channel-plan source pass

The band-plan reference and English translations record the MIC frequency tables and bandwidth definitions checked for this spike. The 6 GHz 53.5 MHz plan contains both frequency pairs in the FX sample; the 70/80 GHz 2000 MHz plan contains the ML sample pair. These establish frequency compatibility, not links between particular licence records.

FWA source excerpts are retained separately from the transport plans of interest. Where a source gives one-way or TDD operation, it does not receive a low/high pair merely because it falls in the same named frequency band.

2026-09-17 — complete FX summary pull

Fetched all 91,956 FX licence summary records, with reported data-update date 2026-09-16. Requests used ST=1&OW=FX&DA=0&DC=3&OF=2&SK=1, then SC=1,10001,…,90001. No frequency, geography, purpose, or licensee filter. The nine full pages contained 10,000 records each; the last contained 1,956. The JSON page bodies total 15,445,952 bytes.

No authentication, HTTP failures, busy responses or page-size obstruction was encountered. Requests ran sequentially with a one-second pause. This is an observed successful pull, not a claim about a documented request-rate quota.

Count calls before and after, and every page header, agreed on total and update date. listInfo.no restarts at 1 on each page; SC supplies the overall starting position. A separate SC=9951&DC=1 request exactly matched the last 50 records of page 1 and first 50 of page 2 after excluding the page-local number. The API does not supply a transactional snapshot or a durable licence ID in these summaries; identical returned summaries were retained.

Counts by licensee

Corporate numbers are the grouping key when supplied; otherwise use the exact returned name. Names are not joined across numbered and unnumbered records. Nineteen names occur with multiple corporate numbers, mostly identically named municipalities. One name (松前町) also occurs without a number. No corporate number has multiple observed names. Corporate numbers include public bodies.

Largest disclosed groups: Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (2000012100001), 7,779; NTT DOCOMO (1010001067912), 2,545; KDDI (9011101031552), 2,168; Hokkaido (7000020010006), 1,001; SoftBank (9010401052465), 977. JOSADA has 13 FX records, matching the earlier operator probe. These count returned licence records, not links or sites.

Raw pages, headers, request manifest, one-off scripts, full summaries and licensee counts are retained outside Git at /data/brific/japan_mic/2026-09-17-fx-summary/: README.md, licensee-counts.csv, fx-summaries.csv, and summary.json.

The licensee screening notes record the top-200 classification, corporate-number prefixes and initial DA=1 review targets.

2026-09-17 — usual-suspect FX detail pull

Fetched ST=1&OW=FX&DA=1&DC=2&OF=2&SK=1&SC=1 with each operator's returned name as NA. All six fit in one page each; no frequency or geographic filter. Every returned name and corporate number matches its intended DA=0 group, and all six counts agree with that pull. All responses report update date 2026-09-16.

The responses contain 107 RF lines, with duplicates preserved. Most frequencies are between 6015 and 7705 MHz; NuVo also has 14.43 and 14.9 GHz. All 44 records mask licence number, licensee address, identification signals and communication counterpart. Locations remain municipality/ward text without coordinates. Multiple place names in radioEuipmentLocation remain uninterpreted.

Optage is skipped for now at Alex's request; its potential role supplying transport to the tracked operators remains open. Okinawa Cellular, NHK and Seibu Railway are also outside this pull.

Saved outside Git in /data/brific/japan_mic/2026-09-17-fx-details/: raw JSON and HTTP headers, request manifest.json, combined fx-details.csv, rf-lines.csv, operator summary.json, and the one-off scripts. Result and RF line positions in the CSVs are local references, not durable station IDs.

Pairing and mapping notes

• McKay / JOSADA: checks the sidechat and saved map against these records, including the three geographic pairings after relaxing equal transmit power and the same-municipality matches omitted from the map.
• NuVo / GT / Ermis: applies the band plans to their detailed records and records candidate pairings and unresolved entries.

These notes retain returned Japanese municipality/ward names and operator-local record positions. The field named tdfkCd contains place text in this pull; municipality codes have not been added.