REPEATER

Repeater Entry Provides Extremely Accurate and True Estimates of Range

The repeater database to end all repeater databases.

Amateur Radio operators often use repeaters to allow multiple people with small, low power radios to communicate over a larger area than they would otherwise be able to.

To use these repeaters, ham radio operators need to know certain details, such as name, frequency, location, and access details. They then program these settings in their radios and are able to use the repeater.

This database is meant to replace the existing databases like repeaterbook and others, because their data is often incomplete, insufficient, outdated, or just flat-out wrong. Moreover, many of these existing databases are focused on making money by collecting data that users submit and then trying to claim copyright on that data. Repeater owners don't have a good or easy way to update databases with details about their repeaters.

This project is all about fixing that.

Goals/Values:

1. Provide information for Amateur Radio (and possible other) operators to conveniently find known-good information about the radio resources near them.
2. This information is provided without cost, copyright, or other restrictions. It will remain open and shareable, in keeping with various ham radio and hacker cultural traditions.
3. The database should hold all known information about a node. If you find that you have information about a node and no way to enter it, please open an issue, or better yet, a pull request adding the format. However, for now, network information should not be included.
4. Quality of data trumps all (because that's the weak part of the existing databases).

Deployments

This repo will automatically deploy the main branch to https://repeater.m17project.org

Development Instructions / HACKING

This is easiest to work with in docker. To see what the make commands are doing, check out the makefile for the directory you run the command in. See also makefiletutorial.com and the makefile docs.

make img and make dev in the root directory here with this README will make a local docker image of the project and start it up with local files under ./app/ mapped into the container under /app/. ./app/ has another makefile which offers some quick options for interacting with django, such as a development server using djangos built-in runserver (make), and another using gunicorn which is a little closer to how it runs in production (make gunicorn).

This docker setup means you can edit the source as you wish, and all the django tools and such are confined to the container. In the container shell.

The general way you'd go about making changes is as follows:

Fork this repo on Github, clone down your fork, check out a branch to work on, make changes to that local copy, commit those changes, push the changes to your fork on github, and open a pull request to the main repo under the M17Project organization.

As a general rule: If you get stuck or confused, spend fifteen solid minutes trying hard, and then reach out on the M17 discord channel in the #repeaterdb room: https://discord.gg/h9SFBJBzx8

Don't suffer for hours, people would love to help!