Amateur Radio Repeater Tones

[KE5TLF]

You've got a rather big problem with ham repeaters listed in the DB. Apparently when the conversion to new format was made someone wrongly assumed that any tone information that was listed in the old format meant OUTPUT tones. Ham repeater tones, when used/published, are ALWAYS for the INPUT side, not the OUTPUT. They MAY very well also be passed on the output, but this is not the case a lot of the time.

Of course the problem, as related to scanner use, is not hearing anything when a tone is stored with the output freq. but is not actually present in the output.

Hopefully an applet/bot/whatever can be written and run on the DB to correct this, else you admins got a lot of work to do manually fixing this...

 

[ka3jjz]

I've discussed this - at length - with several of the DBAs in a private forum. Unfortunately there's a great deal of mis-information (and an outright lack of information) among those that are not hams. They just don't understand how ham repeaters are different from the public service variety. I'm in total agreement with you - I just don't see how this is going to change.

As an example, I've been attempting to get a certain DBA to fix the listings in the Delaware listing. It took 2 submission tickets (and a couple of PMs, one of which remains unanswered) just to get it this far, and it still isn't right - even when I gave that individual the rule to put in the correct input frequencies. The ticket was closed WITHOUT correctly completing the request.

Very sad state of affairs here, I'm afraid

73 Mike

 

[w2xq]

I've discussed this - at length - with several of the DBAs in a private forum. Unfortunately there's a great deal of mis-information (and an outright lack of information) among those that are not hams. They just don't understand how ham repeaters are different from the public service variety. I'm in total agreement with you - I just don't see how this is going to change.

As an example, I've been attempting to get a certain DBA to fix the listings in the Delaware listing. It took 2 submission tickets (and a couple of PMs, one of which remains unanswered) just to get it this far, and it still isn't right - even when I gave that individual the rule to put in the correct input frequencies. The ticket was closed WITHOUT correctly completing the request.

Very sad state of affairs here, I'm afraid

73 Mike

I still don't see the need for the fuss and bother. I just use the coordinators' lists -- e.g. Amateur Radio : FM -- for the areas I travel to. The few running uncoordinated or unlisted repeaters? Who cares? Otherwise these sites are more up to date than anything in print or on CD. What am missing here?

 

[ka3jjz]

PM sent, Tom, before I really lose it...Mike

 

[Thunderknight]

I still don't see the need for the fuss and bother. I just use the coordinators' lists -- e.g. Amateur Radio : FM -- for the areas I travel to. The few running uncoordinated or unlisted repeaters? Who cares? Otherwise these sites are more up to date than anything in print or on CD. What am missing here?

I think what the OP is saying is that people (non hams in particular I'd guess) are going to program an output PL to listen to a repeater that may not be sending any tone.
I think he means the DB tone is actually the input tone, and this is going to mess up monitoring, especially those who use automated data downloads (HP-1 maybe? I don't own one)

 

[KE5TLF]

I still don't see the need for the fuss and bother. I just use the coordinators' lists -- e.g. Amateur Radio : FM -- for the areas I travel to. The few running uncoordinated or unlisted repeaters? Who cares? Otherwise these sites are more up to date than anything in print or on CD. What am missing here?

Oh I dunno, THIS is one reason, from the keyboard of MR. Blanton himself...

* We will now strive to become the most accurate resource for Amateur Radio Repeater information. In the past, we limited our database to only Skywarn and RACES repeater information, however we will be expanding that to cover all Amateur Radio Repeater information around the world.

Not to mention, as I stated, it just flat out WRONG ! :roll:

Very sad state of affairs here, I'm afraid

73 Mike

You got that right, and not just about this specific topic either...

 

[w2xq]

It usually feels better when one stops banging one's head against the wall.

 

[blantonl]

You've got a rather big problem with ham repeaters listed in the DB. Apparently when the conversion to new format was made someone wrongly assumed that any tone information that was listed in the old format meant OUTPUT tones. Ham repeater tones, when used/published, are ALWAYS for the INPUT side, not the OUTPUT. They MAY very well also be passed on the output, but this is not the case a lot of the time.

Of course the problem, as related to scanner use, is not hearing anything when a tone is stored with the output freq. but is not actually present in the output.

Hopefully an applet/bot/whatever can be written and run on the DB to correct this, else you admins got a lot of work to do manually fixing this...

This is because the previous data that we had for amateur radio repeaters was only based on any output tone that was known about the repeater. We never tracked input tones for Amateur repeaters because at the time that data wasn't relevant, so it doesn't make since for us to arbitrarily decide to copy/move those tones to a newly tracked attribute.

If you see cases where the data is incorrect for an amateur radio repeater regarding tones or any other attribute, please submit a change ticket and our admin team should fix the issue.

If you have cases where the admin team is not being responsive or sensitive to your ticket requests, email me directly and I will work with Eric to resolve the issue ASAP.

lindsay@radioreference.com

Contrary to the belief of some in this thread, we are aware that we occasionally face database accuracy and management issues - any user contributed and managed reference faces that.

Rest assured that we listen to each and every suggestion, recommendation, and complaint from our users - and we actively incorporate that feedback into all of our planning and implementation. We might not implement every suggestion, we might not move at the speed that certain individuals want, but we ultimately have been successful in everything that we've executed on so far.

Thanks,