[aprssig] Ham Radio MOBILE Traveler PL-FIND device?

Thu Nov 30 16:24:07 EST 2017

Just a few cents: repeater tower locations in RFinder (and other apps) are
1.) dependent on user data, which is errorprone 2.) a hotly debated privacy
topic, which many repeater owners prefer city center's be the origination
of their repeater or else a telecom company will discover there are hams
taking up valuable tower space, potentially being a liability and 3.)
often protected
by repeater coordination bodies as valuable proprietary information
<https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/3s4y6n/breaking_the_sera_control_on_regional_repeater/>,
which is IMO outside of the bounds of the spirit of amateur radio.

Have you tried getting data from Repeaterbook?

On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 2:23 PM, spam8mybrain <spam8mybrain at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Sorry about the hassles from the unfriendly email service provider, but
> the other one is even more unfriendly (I had to quit using outlook.com
> entirely with APRS-SIG).
>
> Back on topic:
>
> I tried extracting data from RFinder. It would indeed let me extract data,
> but only after it had already decided what repeaters were appropriate for
> me to use, apparently using a heuristic assuming my station was not moving
> (well, I wasn't moving and had turned off GPS access in my phone at the
> time, so they might have better heuristics I don't know about). And the
> data format they provided did not include the positions of the repeater
> towers (which they obviously know, since they can plot them on a map); the
> export file only provided city, state, and country,  and the state and
> country were wrong in some cases. For example, the Dstar repeaters
> co-located with analog repeaters with the same callsign (K3PDR) were
> identified as being in Prince Edward Island, Canada, rather than
> Pennsylvania, United States.
>
> In any case, the exported data doesn't provide enough information for my
> application to do its own heuristics to suggest a best repeater based on
> local station motion (though in this case, the limitation may be inherited
> from RFinder being backwards-compatible with the old TravelPlus for
> Repeaters Windows program).
>
> So I'm going to continue my development based on only APRS data, but not
> prohibiting future use of other data sources if they can actually be useful.
>
> Regarding possible future improvements in the APRS Repeater Object,
> reporting the coverage range (which a few sites do) and/or antenna height
> above ground might be useful to better decide which repeaters might be most
> useful. Unfortunately, the potentially most useful information isn't in any
> data source: "Is this repeater monitored 24/7?" Finding an ideally-located
> repeater with no one listening isn't very useful. Any chance that we could
> get the Object transmitter to know how long since the last time someone
> successfully relayed through the voice repeater (i.e., proper PL and more
> than a ker-chunk)? :-)
>
> Andrew, KA2DDO
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Matthew Chambers <mchambers at showmeham.info>
> Date: 11/29/17 17:48 (GMT-05:00)
> To: TAPR APRS Mailing List <aprssig at tapr.org>
> Subject: Re: [aprssig] Ham Radio MOBILE Traveler PL-FIND device?
>
> Ok, I have no idea what’s going on but someone on this thread has
> something in their email that keeps dragging this whole thread into my spam
> box?
>
> And I can see some of the emails on my phone that aren’t showing up in my
> laptop email client, to reply to one of those, the repeater book app can
> control some radios through bluetooth serial connection! More radios are
> coming out with bluetooth audio and serial capabilities so we’ll see that
> functionality expand.
>
> And on the PL tone usage, PL tone usage is now required in Missouri for
> new or changes to coordinated systems. There is a map with strongly
> recommended PL tones (or DCS, CC, NAC, YSF) based on region of the state
> and surrounding states for minimum interference. Not all repeaters but most
> appear to be following the recommendations. That makes it a bit easier if
> you will be in Missouri to ahead of time look at the map for where in the
> state you’ll be and have a good idea what PL Tones will be in use.
>
> It’s knowing what’s going on with your radio transmission (freq, offset,
> PL tone, etc) that separates the hams from the LMR appliance operators. I
> have a LMR radio that I don’t even know what band I’m on when I key up, it
> could be 155, 700 or 800 MHz depending on which tower is strongest at any
> given moment. I hope ham radio doesn’t get dumbed down to that level!
>
> On Nov 29, 2017, at 2:12 PM, Matthew Chambers <
> mchambers at mchambersradio.com> wrote:
>
> I use the RepeaterBook app on my android devices and the website on my
> laptop. The app is nice in that it uses your phones location to find nearby
> repeaters and even sorts them by distance from you.
>
> On the website here’s the link to use for finding repeaters along a
> planned travel route https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeaters/travel.php
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 29, 2017, at 1:15 PM, . <groups.0acf at headquarters.earth> wrote:
>
> RepeaterBook?
>
> Jeff
> N5TEV
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [aprssig] Ham Radio MOBILE Traveler PL-FIND device?
> From: spam8mybrain <spam8mybrain at yahoo.com>
> To: TAPR APRS Mailing List <aprssig at tapr.org>
>
> Too bad all of the repeater databases have always been closed and
> proprietary (both the old ARRL TravelMate program and the new RFinder
> mobile app).
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>
>
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