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hmatuschek / qdmr

A GUI application for configuring and programming cheap DMR radios under Linux and MacOS X.
https://dm3mat.darc.de/qdmr/
GNU General Public License v3.0
223 stars 46 forks source link

Rework repeater database sources #494

Closed hmatuschek closed 2 days ago

hmatuschek commented 5 days ago

Repeater book is a really bad source. They have a very restrictive usage policy while relying on the community to keep their product up to date. I believe, that a reliable, community-driven repeater database with a liberal usage policy is a basic infrastructure that we all benefit from. Maybe someone at the large HAM clubs (ARRL, RSGB, DARC, ...) feels responsible to provide such a platform. Anyway, I need a replacement for the repeater book source. I'll switch back to

jancona commented 5 days ago

Yeah, the Repeaterbook API is broken right now too. ARRL says it gets its data from RFinder, but they're in flux right now--most of their assets, apparently including the directory, have been sold to a new company Unified Radios. The directory is online here: https://directory.unifiedradios.com/ but Rfinder's directory wasn't free and I doubt this one will be for long.

Despite RepeaterBook's shortcomings, Garrett seems like a nice guy, and I don't think the terms are too bad. Are you planning on removing it as a source, or just adding others?

hmatuschek commented 4 days ago

I would try to keep the repeaterbook interface and add the other ones as primary sources. However, these sources work very differently. While I need to query repeaterbook all the time and thus increasing their load, I only need to fetch a few MB from the other sources once a week or so. Being so restrictive actually increases the load on the repeater book side. However, if it gets too difficult to keep repeater book in, I will throw that source out.

jancona commented 4 days ago

One additional source to consider is RadioID, although it's only DMR repeaters. See: https://radioid.net/database/dumps. rptrs.json is their entire repeater database and map.json is the subset that includes lat/lon coordinates. One downside is that they include quite a few repeaters that aren't on the air, but data quality is an issue with all the sources I've seen.

hmatuschek commented 2 days ago

Okay, thanks for the info. I've added these sources (hearham is disabled for now, but can be enabled in the settings dialog). I kept repeaterbook but there is a server issue for non-US repeaters. You can test it in the branch https://github.com/hmatuschek/qdmr/tree/494-rework-repeater-database-sources.

jancona commented 2 days ago

It works for me! (I didn't test Repeaterbook's rest-of-world database because I know the endpoint is down.) One minor glitch: If I select or unselect sources in Settings, the changes don't seem to take effect until I restart, at least for the non-Repeaterbook sources. Perhaps this is because you cache them at start-up?

hmatuschek commented 2 days ago

I merge the cached repeaters at startup into a single dataset. It is hard to remove some information from that merged set afterwards. So, I would keep it this way for now.