The Google Earth Repeaters Overlay Project for the Entire United States and Territories

WB2YMU,

Thank You.

Ryan, AE0TO
o7

 

ABSOLUTELY....Trying to get it to work on Google Earth on my Samsung Tablet S6...so I have it portable...

 

WB2YMU,

Hopefully, you've got er' dunn. Would recommend downloading the whole batch into one folder and going from there. It's only like 30MB...

One thing I didn't think about was the folder's internal directory structure being referenced from within the KML file. It worked for me upon testing the "All-In-One" file only, on my phone, but something that popped into my head after I posted it on here. Not sure.... Let me know if you have problems though, I'll do what I can to help/fix any issues.

Ryan
o7

 

While a great project and congrats and kudos for the hard work, unfortunately, looking at Colorado, it is really not complete and up to date. So many repeaters as mentioned above are either changed, gone, not kept up to date in repeater book, etc. A good general reference to look up more data on particular repeaters you may be interested in, but unfortunately repeater book is not the best reference. Thanks again though, outstanding work. 73' Jack KEØVH, www.skyhublink.com (our website for our repeaters IS up to date for anyone interested.)

 

KE0VH, Jack

Well, that's unfortunate and seems to be the trend for some areas in the U.S.

While this project was more for an offline archive for planning and static use, with a secondary use for travel planning, I completed a separate project focused primarily for travel here:

https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?th...ncies-2m-70cm-bands-only.855064/#post-6489117

Now, the same information was pulled from Repeater Book's database, with the inherent "Bad Information", I've provided the tools to create your own personal lists, which can be fully customized. This other project is focused primarily on the shared frequencies of repeaters, across a wider geographic area. For example, if you wanted to have every possible 2M & 70Cm Repeater loaded into your mobile radio, then 19,000+ separate repeaters would be impossible for many folks' memory slots, not to mention the long scan times being impractical. But after removing the duplicates of redundant frequencies, the true "sight picture" of all repeater frequencies used it the U.S. is approximately 1,303. (Again Repeater Book's Database)

Now, I am a brand new Ham, receiving my ticket at the beginning for Feb 2023 so I have much to learn, but when some Hams reply back to me on this project and the other one essentially asking me "Did you edit out all of the Dead Repeaters", I laugh out loud. 1. I'm not doing Repeater Book's for them and Quality Control Checking and/or Deconflicting 21,000+ repeaters across the U.S. because that's impossible for me to do. 2. The common sense aspect of Does it Work or Not? NEXT!

For the Travelling Ham Mobile project it's a simple matter of saving memory slots and scanning the frequencies. Again it's a Binary Go/No-Go thing with the obvious variable of whether it's being used at the time you're within Tx/Rx Range. Quick example, for the 5ish states I travel through, this trimmed down my memory slot usage by 60% leaving memory slots for other stuff I like to scan.

Circling back to Colorado specifically, I hate to hear that the status of the repeaters out there are in such a degraded condition. Politics aside, I have found from feedback, that the state of repeaters in a given state is directly coinciding with the general state of affairs, as a whole, in the same area. Bad In, Bad Out. Having lived in Colorado for 9+ years, U.S. Air Force Academy, and having my youngest daughter and 1/3 of my grandkids out there, I'll definitely dig into the repeaters out there, so THANK YOU for the resource! Not looking forward to the next trip on I-70 through Kansas, however! I do miss my Elk Hunting grounds out in Eagle County near Red Table Mountain and Ruedi Reservoir, but wouldn't pay the non-resident fees at this point. Can still camp there though!

As far as repeater accuracy goes, from what I've found is that each State has a "Repeater Council" or something thereabouts, which, in theory should be honchoing the management of these. I think a large portion of these "dead repeaters" may be individual hams backyard projects, which go-offline due to a variety of factors and never get updated.

Thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated!

73's

Ryan, AE0TO
o7

 

The problem is the source of the data. It is so unreliable in general. I have people all the time trying to use RepeaterBook to claim repeaters exist or don't exist as we are trying to help them coordinate frequencies in my state that I just tell them that they may not reference it in our process as it is of no value in the case of determining what repeaters are coordinated or not. Having a reliable source for the entire country is still a dream. Maybe someday

 

K4DL,

That seems to be the case for some folks and that sucks. It's 100% accurate for my area. I find the PTT Button to be the best confirmation tool. Old encyclopedias are outdated, but still useful. I focus on what I can control and 21,000 repeaters I cannot. What it does provide is a prebuilt library which is 100% customizable with a simple cross referencing of each state's Repeater Council. Again, things out of my control. Hopefully it can help more than 50% of the people choose not to dismiss it out of hand due to their poor experiences with Repeater Book. Or perhaps with all the sheer brain power in Ham World, make a better product.

73's
Ryan, AE0TO
o7

 

In our part of the country, they do not use the data from the state repeater councils or frequency coordinating entities. At least my state and those surrounding. I can get the information on the coordinated repeaters from their sites but Repeater Book is off a lot in our area.

I know for the past 8 years Repeater Book has not approached my repeater council to work with them. Perhaps they could look into establishing relationships with them.

 

That would be nice. Not sure of the ground level interaction that Repeater Book has. I would think they keep it simple and stay in receive mode, relying on the Repeater Managers to keep them updated.

The cool thing with these overlays is you can correct them by editing the Properties of each Repeater you want to track on Google Earth. Once complete be sure to save your new KML file locally with a File Naming Convention of your choosing.

Ryan, AE0TO
o7