Saturday, February 06, 2010

Australian amateur radio repeater finder

I love working with the Google Maps API. There are so many useful applications of a technology for presenting information on a map. Here's my latest: repeaterfinder.

repeaterfinderscreen.png

Like all good software projects, I wanted this myself when recently travelling to Coffs Harbour. The only way I could find where repeaters are was via the WIA's PDF listing.

Screen shot 2010-02-06 at 1.56.04 PM.pngWhat I dreamed of was to be able to go to a site on my iPhone and have it use the GPS location and then show me all the nearest repeaters in order of distance along with their frequency, CTCSS and other info. I'm not quite there yet, but I am on the way to that objective.

The current web app uses browser geolocation to open up where it thinks you are - this isn't terribly accurate but it's a good start.

Data at the moment is derived from the text list the WIA kindly sent me, it's pretty rough and I haven't fixed up all the modes such as DV which I'm interested in.

I have loads of ideas about where this could go, and would be interested to hear from potential users about what they'd like to see - please comment below.

Enjoy.

3 comments:

Alan Yates said...

Peter,

Great to see this live!

I think it is very useful, especially if you travel about a lot.

Yes, the geolocation puts me out near Orange for some reason, but picking it up from your mobile device will be fantastic.

Great work!

Regards,
Alan

Darryl Ross said...

I started work on a web app for doing this and had plans for incorporating it into my car computer project. With rig control it would be great to pull up the list of nearest repeaters and click a button to tune it.

I ended up writing a script to screen-scrape the ACMA radcomm database to pull out repeater location information, frequencies, etc. Pretty rough, but it did work.

You can see the first version of it at http://theshack.afoyi.com/repeaters/

Regards
Darryl, VK5HZ

Peter Marks said...

Great stuff Darryl,

Yes I also had a look at scraping the ACMA site but it doesn't lend itself to it...

The WIA was kind enough to send me their data as a text file so that was a great start.

Thanks for writing in.

peter