VK Repeater Map

The new VK Repeater Map application is online and ready for use/testing at this link here.

The Google Maps overlays show all Australian amateur radio repeaters.

You can navigate and zoom as required and click on a repeater-site icon to display frequency, ctcss and other details and notes for that repeater.

The radio buttons at the bottom allow for all repeaters to be shown, or just those in the selected band.

I have always found that locating nearby repeaters using the WIA callbook or pdf file data, and then extracting the details for progamming the radio to be a tedious and laborious process. Having the map makes it easy to find the repeaters that might be within range, and with just a click, to get the details.

I hope that this will be a useful tool for the VK amateur community.

Creating The Application and Data

The application itself consists of six KML files; one for each band and one for all bands, one of which is selected as an overlay layer for the map by means of some Javascript attached to the radio buttons at bottom.

The repeater data was obtained from the CSV file provided by the WIA here, which was processed by a perl script. The script extracted the repeater data line by line, and for each callsign did a lookup of ACMA online register to get the licence information which contains the site identifier. Another lookup then gave the site information from which the site’s longitude and latitude was obtained. The data was stored in an SQL database.

The KML files were then generated with another perl script which obtained and organised the required data via SQL queries of the database.

I hope people find this application useful. Please let me know what you think.