Repeater Footprint Project
From AB9RF
The Repeater Footprint Project is largely an excuse for me to play with Splat!, but I have a feeling it might be useful, too. It came out of discussions with various people, including K5EHX and NT4TN as well as listening to various hams on the DuPage Radio Club VHF machine (W9DUP).
Apparently there's a UK club that has a site that lists each of the repeaters in their area (possibly the whole country) with maps showing where one can expect to be able to reach the repeater. This seems as if it would be a useful thing. The group on the W9DUP repeater also seemed to think so and were opening wondering on the air how one would go about doing that. Now, I happen to know how to go about doing it, but I wasn't able to get a word in edgewise in the ragchew (gotta love VHF ragchewers), so instead I decided just to go ahead and do it.
So, what I've done so far is take the repeaters in K5EHX's listing and create a page here on this wiki for each one. Each page has a wikitemplate that contains all the basic data for that repeater. The next step is to generate maps and coverage data with splat to add to the wiki. I've already got a little script that'll take splat output and generate a report by grid square, giving the minimum path loss to any location in that grid square. Grid squares (at least the six-character variety) are small enough that this is a pretty good way to describe coverage. Deciding what the maximum acceptable path loss, of course, requires combining several different factors, but fortunately tweaking those doesn't require rerunning the coverage analysis; only changes in the antenna height or location, or operating frequency, force that.
Also on the table is working out replication with K5EHX. He's already set up a means by which I can obtain a weekly updated dump of his database (thanks, K5EHX), but I have to figure out how to integrate it. So that's on the agenda too.
Of course, much of the data will be bad: we don't have accurate lats, longs, or altitudes for most repeaters, and it's even rarer that we have accurate transmitter and receiver performance data. Additional complications will come into play for sites that have multiple receiver locations (e.g. the Chicago FM Club's repeater, which has six inputs) or which have directional radiation patterns. Still, something is better than nothing, and maybe if we're lucky we can get more accurate data in the repeater databases, to boot.
