Towers and coverage

With no towers, radios have coverage everywhere. Place towers to make signal matter.

Placing towers

Open System → Sites. Click the map to add a tower, drag it to move it, and set its height and range. The map shades each tower’s reach using the same distance-to-bars formula the radio uses, for handhelds and vehicle radios. The shading ignores terrain and buildings, so real signal in game is lower in built-up or hilly areas.

How signal works in game

Every second the radio scores each tower by distance, line of sight toward it, and whether the player is indoors. The best tower sets the signal bars:

• 3–4 bars: clear audio.
• 1–2 bars: received audio breaks up.
• 0 bars: the radio shows OUT OF RANGE and can neither talk nor hear.

Vehicle radios reach further than handhelds. Players can type /radiodiag to see their current tower and bars.

Checked by the server

The radio works out its own bars, because line of sight needs the game world, so the radio system checks them. Your game server reports each player’s position every couple of seconds, and a radio’s signal is capped at what a vehicle radio in the open could get from that spot. A modified client can’t claim coverage it doesn’t have.

This check needs OneSync (FiveM’s default). set meridian_server_api "false" turns off the game server link, and with it this check.

Plan limits

Your plan sets how many towers you can place.