Greetings fellow repeater owners! There have been some recent changes within KARC and some other announcements to share with you.
- New Frequency Coordinator
- New Coordinations and updates
- Upcoming coordination fee structure
- RepeaterBook is now serving as the official Kansas directory
I, Justin Reed (NV8Q) have stepped in as Frequency Coordinator, and Brian Short (KC0BS) has taken a role as Assistant Frequency Coordinator, effective immediately. Brian has donated many years of love and work as Frequency Coordinator, but his work schedule has increased to the point that it became necessary to pass on the torch. Brian will continue to serve as the KARC President. We have also elected Cort Buffington (N0MJS) to the Board of Directors.
In my newly elected role as Frequency Coordinator, I am currently working through a backlog of update and new repeater requests. Please be patient. If you sent in a request that has not been acted upon, or if you are unclear on the status of a coordination, please get in touch with me.
As many of you read last year, the ARRL decided to partner with RFinder for their repeater directory, and at the same time they stopped subsidizing the repeater councils for providing the data. The subsidy was not much, but on a per-repeater basis it was enough to cover basic expenses like web hosting and postage. We believe that no one person should bear the expenses of the repeater council. The web hosting service has been donated for the past year by the K-Link Repeater Network. The KARC board members will be making a decision soon on the fee structure for coordinated repeaters.
KARC has also decided to utilize RepeaterBook as the offical public repeater listing for Kansas. RepeaterBook is a free online repeater directory, with iOS and Android phone apps, and we think it will be much easier to store and update information in one place rather than maintaining separate lists. Using RepeaterBook will also make it more difficult for certain other entities to scrape the data to use in their for-profit repeater directories.
Stay tuned for more updates…..