On 5/4/2010 12:44 PM, Francis Miele wrote:
> You can't blame the league. As I understand it, it is up to the
> repeater coordinating bodies in each state to supply the info to the
> league, If the repeaters are not coordinated, they probably don't get
> listed.
>
> Fran, W1FJM
I haven't been the guy responsible for sending the data to the League
for a few years now, so I'd have to check on this...
But yes, a few years ago you COULD blame the League. In order to show
D-STAR (or any other specialty repeater type) in the publication the
DATABASE must have a field or code for it. Last I checked, theirs
doesn't. But they've been upgrading it over the last few years... so
probably by now... things are better.
Back when I WAS one of the guys responsible, ARRL one year went from one
DB to a completely different DB engine, and sent the upload/field
specifactions about four weeks before they were due.
There's ZERO communication ahead of time for such DB field changes...
the year the IRLP and Echolink node numbers first showed up, I believe
if you look, Colorado didn't submit any. Why? We found out these new
fields in the ARRL DB existed only a few weeks before the submission
deadline. No time to gather the data, change *our* DB to have the
fields, and submit the information.
I'm SURE they worked VERY hard on that change to a new engine, new
fields, etc. The problem was, no one KNEW they were doing that, that
year. Without coordination of the bodies feeding their data, the first
year of such field changes is a complete waste of effort. Maybe by the
NEXT year, that data starts showing up, and even then only from
coordination bodies that have active DB developers, etc... who can make
changes fast enough to then poll the membership/coordinated systems for
their "new" data.
Remember, the only thing technically required for a coordination in most
places is the emission mask/type, the Height Above Average Terrain, the
ERP of the antenna system overall, the Lat/Long (making sure they're
using the right geo-reference datum if using a GPS) and the frequency.
Anything else is an add-on "service" provided by MOST, but not ALL
coordination bodies. The #1 job of a coordination body is coordination
-- they don't care if your 12.5 KHz wide signal is D-STAR, MotoTRBO, or
something of your own creation -- other than knowing if the emission
type is compatible with adjacent and co-channel systems at particular
distances and power levels.
The absolute best-case scenario would be for the ARRL to pay some
developers to write a significantly better coordination DB and system
for tracking/entering all the data that could be used by coordinators
nationwide, that was powerful and flexible enough to handle all the
various one-offs that occur naturally in different coordination body rules.
The chances that will ever happen, in my not-so-humble opinion, are
about nil. In many countries, coordination *is* a government and/or
government assisted function, and the government maintains the DB.
Here, coordination is an all-volunteer activity, with some head-nods to
NFCC as a national "standards" body (with varying levels of success),
and underneath them you can have anything from a highly-technical group
with databases, online mapping, tracking of all known repeater types,
etc... down to a guy who has a filing cabinet in the back of his
double-wide, 'cause "that's how I've done it for 20 years!".
So... if you want D-STAR data in your local coordination DB, your best
option today is to get involved, help figure out what fields are in the
ARRL DB for such things, and get your coordinating body's records for
such things into an electronic format that can be imported to ARRL each
year (usually in January) and work your butt off to make sure it
actually happens in your area. It really doesn't happen any other way.
Volunteers who'll go above and beyond the call to match ARRL's DB schema
changes as they happen, and keep the local records up to date in an
appropriate electronic format ready to hit "export" to send the data to
them... that's always been how it works.
If the record-keeping system your area uses is standardized and has the
same fields ARRL has... great. If not... you're in for a very long
haul, and a lot of work.
Colorado had a volunteer non-professional coder who spent countless
hours building a web front-ended system for the coordinating body,
backed by a MySQL database, that does all sorts of useful things -- but
it's slightly buggy (not a lot, just a little), and someone has to know
its "quirks". Colorado delegates to the coordination body voted to
spend up to $2000 to have a developer update it, but finding a
professional developer willing to work that CHEAPLY has been a
challenge, I hear.
There's probably a challenge out there for a entrepreneurial-minded and
VERY convincing person to take up... write specifications, work with
coordination bodies, develop code, and create an elegant "frequency
coordination management" software package that's damn near free, if you
compare the number of hours you'd put into it, vs. what you could sell
it for. It would have to manage the paperwork of letter writing
(registered mail, searching for "lost" people with expired/expiring
coordinations), etc... and it'd have to be moldable to the different
business rules of all of the coordinating bodies out there. (The only
way I see that happening today, would be a web-based service, customized
to each coordinating body, and running on enough redundant hardware to
NEVER be down...)
Meanwhile, the system we have here works pretty darn well for a
non-professionally developed system.... You gotta love any system
that'll automatically search for conflicts (using our local critera, and
hard-coded), and print out all documentation and save it in PDF format.
Many large bodies have their own home-grown systems that are similar.
(Heck, I've heard that SERA has had bar-code scanning on theirs for
decades now due to dedicated developers for paperwork tracking
purposes... but I don't live there, so that's unconfirmed to me...
probably documented in back issues of the SERA Journal many years ago,
if someone's bored and wants to do the research.)
It's all WAAAAY better than when I started volunteering in the
coordinating body many many years ago... the technology of the day back
then was a giant filing cabinet and someone to paw through it... and
Excel spreadsheets. We left those days behind quite a while ago in
Colorado, now.
Sorry if that's all off-topic, but there's not a lot of details out
there about how this all really works... and Hams need to know it's not
all by "magic". If your local data in the ARRL Directory is "pretty
good", call up the ham volunteer who's spending 40-50 hours a year or
more keeping it that way... and thank them.
Nate WY0X
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