Looking for Amateur Radio Repeaters?

Looking for Amateur Radio Repeaters?

Repeaters are often used to extend the range of amateur radios, typically on 2 m and 70 cm, in my region. That too, 70 cm repeaters are only a handful in VU land, while there are quite a few abroad in regions where the population of amateur radio operators are very high like Japan, Australia, Europe and North America. Best resource to find out details of repeaters in VU land is the QSL net page of VU2JOS, which maintains an updated list of VHF and UHF repeaters, their callsigns, operating frequency, offsets, timing of nets and callsigns of usual net controllers. That page gives a lot more information on Amateur Radio in India as well. But if you are on the look out for the Amateur Radio repeaters globally, the best resource I have found so far is the online RepeaterBook website.

Even though RepeaterBook website now lists GMRS repeaters, I will concentrate on Amateur Radio repeaters. It is a free to use resource which can be searched even without creating an account. They have mentioned that My Favorite Repeaters beta project has ended and Beta 2.0 will be unveiled at HamCation Orlando 2024, in February. There is a new Proximity Search 2.0 for North American repeaters. Amateur Radio Repeaters are listed as North American Repeaters and Rest of the World Repeaters. Earlier repeaters from VU land were not there, but now they have been included. North American Repeaters include those in United States, Canada and Mexico as state wise lists. While the states of United States and Mexico are listed in alphabetical order, those from Canada does not seem to be so.

Repeaters outside North America are listed region wise and then country wise. Repeaters are divided band wise into 10 m, 6 m, 4 m, 2 m, 1¼ m, 70 cm, 33 cm, 23 cm, 13 cm, 3 cm etc. There is subdivision based on features like AllStar, DMR, D-Star, EchoLink, IRLP etc. Emergency service repeaters like those with Weather Nets, Emergency Power etc. are also there. Another good option is to find repeaters by nearest city/town.

There is a callsign search facility linked to QRZ, HamQTH, and HamCall. But the lookup is not restricted to repeater callsigns. There is also a RepeaterBook search and Wiki Search there. But I could not find repeaters in my region on the RepeaterBook search with callsign. It is mentioned that there are around 28,000 repeaters globally. There are many more utilities available there on the website, which I did not go into in detail because I am yet to travel globally!