I know some administrators will submit their agencies info themselves, some won't. YMMV. The county radio guy is "aloof and unapproachable" because it's literally not his job to do what you are asking him to do, or what you think he should do. He's allowed to be himself, so let him be. If there was an agency directive from the county to disclose information to RR for the greater good, he'd be an amazing asset. In your case, probably not the best idea to meddle in the affairs of dragons, unless you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
Labeling is literally the most subjective thing on here, as I've seen individual agencies list channels as whatever suits them at the time - and have almost no consistiency on an agency level - much less a RR level. Whomever knows what it does, when it's submitted, basically gets creative license to name it - unless the DB admin here decides they know better.
This is a well traveled road over the last 9+ years, look and see...
I met this guy in 2 different contexts, long before my very recent interest in the accuracy of the database. First, he is a member of the local amateur radio club. I attended some club meetings, but it wasn't what I expected out of an amateur radio club, so I quit attending. It was more social than technical, and very little actual radio was discussed. In any case, I mentioned in passing that I was thinking of setting up a fill-in APRS iGate because in my town, low wattage APRS transmitters like the 500 milliwatt trackers had trouble reaching the club's digipeaters. I don't know whether he misunderstood and thought I wanted to set up a digipeater instead of an iGate.
But he was super territorial and insisted that there was no need for that, and went on to explain that members of the club drove all around my town and got into the existing digipeaters just fine. Well presumably this was with mobile radios running higher wattage than a 500 mW tracker. And an iGate does not retransmit anything so no risk of packet collisions. He just was so quick to shoot down my idea that I came away from the encounter with a very bad impression. This guy had no tact whatsoever.
Anyhow the second time I met him, I had briefly been a part of the city volunteer fire department. He was asked to come explain how the radios worked to the department. I was interested to know how to use them for communication between individual firefighters instead of just communicating directly with dispatch. Specifically which frequency/channel we should use for the purpose. After about 45 minutes of pointed questioning, I don't think any of us came away with any knowledge we didn't already have. He somehow managed to answer our questions without conveying any useful information. However in that particular instance he absolutly WAS being paid by the county to share information about the county radio system, and still managed to give the impression that we (the fire department) were wasting his time. So yeah, I won't bother him anymore.
As for the last 9 years, I have had an account here for about that long. But I haven't spent a whole lot of time reading here since I have had other hobbies that were foremost in my mind. You mentioned this twice. I am a member of numerous online discussion fora, and they all seem to have their own "forum culture", along with accepted practices, etc. There is a common theme among forum members that love to point out when a topic has already been discussed in the past.
Well, I was not a party to those past discussions. Yes, the archives are searchable. But that is roughly equivalent to a person in a live conversation being directed to a library of audio recordings and being told to go have a listen to them, rather than engaging in conversation. You can imagine that might be a bit off-putting.
The same is true of text based conversations. Being told to go read some archived discussion is off-putting. In my many tens of thousands of online forum posts across perhaps 20 or so different websites, I don't think I ever felt the need to direct someone to search old posts, rather than engage them in conversation in the present. And if storage space is a concern, it should be noted that I did pay for temporary database download access, so I am supporting the site.
Now all that said, if it is site policy to refrain from asking questions that have already been answered somewhere else, I will "take the hint" and avoid doing so.
