Why bother re-formatting it at all? Just grab the file as-is and put it on the empeg, then have the app Do The Right Thing to read the data it needs.

Because it is about 187 MB worth of data. For all AM, FM and TV stations, with the complete history of 'application/renewal/adress changes' and data about who the registrants are etc.

Then there is information about what antenna is used, what the stations output power is, whether it is a directional antenna and the observed strength in various directions. And there are a bunch of stations that are not active anymore, or have no coordinate information.

My guess is that i99% is useless for our purposes and from what I can tell we would end up with less than about 2-3MB of data, which will be trivial to seek through even when we don't have a fancy index.