Information is valuable to users when it is available not only at the right time but also at the right place. To support efficient location-based data access in wireless data broadcast systems, a distributed spatial index (called DSI) is presented in this paper. DSI is highly efficient because it has a linear yet fully distributed structure that naturally shares links in different search paths. DSI is very resilient to the error-prone wireless communication environment because interrupted search operations based on DSI can be resumed easily. It supports search algorithms for classical location-based queries such as window queries and kNN queries in both of the snapshot and continuous query modes. In-depth analysis and simulation-based evaluation have been conducted. The results show that DSI significantly out-performs a variant of R-trees tailored for wireless data broadcast environments.