Radio maps quantify magnitudes such as the received signal strength at every location of a geographical region. Although the estimation of radio maps has attracted widespread interest, the vast majority of works rely on simulated data and, therefore, cannot establish the effectiveness and relative performance of existing algorithms in practice. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive and rigorous study of radio map estimation (RME) in the real world. The main features of the RME problem are analyzed and the capabilities of existing estimators are compared using large measurement datasets collected in this work. By studying four performance metrics, recent theoretical findings are empirically corroborated and a large number of conclusions are drawn. Remarkably, the estimation error is seen to be reasonably small even with few measurements, which establishes the viability of RME in practice. Besides, from extensive comparisons, it is concluded that estimators based on deep neural networks necessitate large volumes of training data to exhibit a significant advantage over more traditional methods. Combining both types of schemes is seen to result in a novel estimator that features the best performance in most situations. The acquired datasets are made publicly available to enable further studies.
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