I regret to inform you that RBook, Repeater Book, or any publication sponsored or available currently by the ARRL is NOT accurate. The Illinois Repeater Association NFP (IRA) does not supply information to the above sources since 2015, therefore, the only accurate compendium of accurate repeater information is directly from the Illinois Repeater Association, NFP at
www.ilra.net.
The reason is an explanation of the inaccuracies from the IRA Frequency Coordinator Aaron Collins N9OZB dated December 2, 2015:
I am writing this with much regret, but the Illinois Repeater Association can no longer recommend the ARRL Repeater Directory as a valid and up-to-date source of repeater information. The information they have for the upcoming 2015-2016 issue of their Repeater Directory will have severely out of date (2 or more years old) information for the State of Illinois and quite a few others. None of the changes made in the last calendar year of 2014 through the end of 2015 for Illinois (and many other states) will be included in this year’s upcoming issue, the same as last year. They will keep re-printing the last bulk data submission they would accept from us at the end of 2013, no matter how out of date and useless the information has become. From this point on, the only official source of current and valid repeater directory information will be directly from the IRA website at
www.ilra.net. This gets updated directly from our database several times throughout the year, usually every 2-3 months or so, and should be considered the only known accurate and up-to-date source of repeater information for the state of Illinois.
This repudiation is strictly aimed at the Repeater Directory group within the ARRL, an otherwise fine and useful organization that has many other facets which are unaffected by and unrelated to this issue. The Illinois Repeater Association has had a long history and successful relationship with the ARRL in the past. However, due to an internal decision at the Repeater Directory division of the ARRL, they have decided to make some very serious and detrimental changes to the way their directory information is collected and maintained. Since they have made these changes, we can no longer submit our information in the simple batch form as we have for the past 15 or more years.
The changes in the ARRL submission procedure started at the beginning of 2014, when the decision was made to require the various states’ Frequency Coordinators to manually log in to an ARRL website, and edit the repeater directory listings all by hand, online. This ridiculous solution no longer allowed any batch submissions of the state’s data from anyone anymore.
This was completely absurd. We maintain over 500 listings in our state alone. We refused to do their work for them, for free. We refused to maintain two separate, redundant databases; our own state data, and theirs. We had no resources to allocate for this needless extra maintenance work. If we agreed to comply with their proposed changes, it would mean what was once a simple 10-minute email submission by the Frequency Coordinator to the ARRL once a year would turn into a full-time 8-hour-a-day job for 1 person for over an entire week. Our organization consists entirely of volunteers doing this work without compensation or salary and placing extra, needless time demands on them like this for absolutely no good reason was clearly unacceptable.
As a result, last year’s 2014-2015 directory contained stale data over a year old for many states, including Illinois. Due to their adoption of this very questionable policy, they had managed to annoy and alienate many of the various states’ coordinating bodies. One of our neighboring states has severed ties entirely with the ARRL. Several others were very unhappy with this turn of events, as were we, and were still considering their position on the matter. The future appeared very uncertain.
Now, fast-forward to earlier this year. A software consulting company was hired by the ARRL to resolve the situation, and they went off and rewrote most of the software the ARRL uses to compile the repeater directory internally. In the process of doing this, working under the inscrutable direction of the ARRL repeater directory management, they designed an entirely new system that was completely incompatible with one or more of the existing coordination software programs that are widely in use by Coordinators, without any way to transfer the information in our databases to theirs. This solution was just as bad as the previous idea and likewise had the same effect - leaving hand-editing the data as the only course of action.
I was very disappointed to hear this. Their refusal to adopt one of the current working neutral languages or support any of the older submission formats was a very arbitrary and unreasonable approach to the problem. Instead, they have decided to re-invent the wheel, and have come up with some new bizarre format that serves no one very well except themselves. The time that was spent coming up with this new foreign format would have been much better spent making it compatible with the many tools that already exist, and that have already worked out most of the various issues that complicate such an undertaking.
While I understood the need for a new and better way of storing and exchanging data needed with the new digital formats that have to be supported, abandoning all reason in the approach taken has caused the further alienation of a large number of states' coordinating bodies. Arbitrarily requiring everyone to now accommodate a new and incompatible submission format regardless of the fact that it is completely unsupported by our current coordination software was an extremely unwise decision. Most of the state's Coordinators are just users of their particular coordination software. They are not expert programmers and do not have the skill or ability to write some kind of a conversion utility for themselves, nor do most states' volunteer coordinating bodies have the resources to hire a professional programmer or consultant to write a conversion utility or program. Requiring them to adopt their new format is beyond the ability of most of the various states’ Coordinators to accommodate in any reasonable fashion.
I am sincerely dismayed by the outcome here, as I was assured by the various local and regional ARRL representatives that this would be all worked out in time for this year's annual submission. This represents a massive failure and has resulted in a disastrous outcome in which everyone loses. The IRA loses. We don't get our current repeater data distributed. The ARRL loses. They are distributing a vastly inferior and out-of-date product. Last but not least, the amateur radio community loses. They don't get a useful, accurate portable reference directory they can rely on for valid and current repeater information.
We made the decision earlier this year to repudiate the ARRL Repeater Directory unless and until this situation was rectified. Unfortunately, since the situation still has not been resolved, we must continue to take this position. This decision has been made and this notice published with the consent and unanimous agreement of the Illinois Repeater Association Board of Directors.
Aaron A. Collins, N9OZB
Illinois Repeater Association
Frequency Coordinator