Repeaters

Repeaters is the tab for the contacts most of us actually make: the ones through a machine. It sits in the sidebar as its own row, beside the Parks on the Air group and DX Chasing, marked by two operators with a signal path arcing up over the repeater between them.

Where POTA hunting revolves around parks and DX chasing around countries, this tab revolves around machines. Every contact you log here records which repeater carried it — callsign and output frequency both — so your logbook can answer a question no other logbook asks: which machines have you actually been through, and how many times each?

That's the whole idea. Repeater QSOs are the most common contacts in the hobby and the least-served by logging software; a contact through W0ERH 442.100 normally reads as a callsign and a frequency and nothing else. Here it reads as a machine you've worked three times, on a map of the machines you can reach.

Like DX Chasing, Repeaters is a single row rather than a group: you work through a machine rather than activating one, so the tab has a hunting side only.

You can browse the machines near you without an account

Signed out, hamtrax.com carries an RPTR tab of its own in the tab strip, after Home, Hunt, Activate, and DX — the same nearby-machine list and map described below, plus a short line explaining what a repeater is for anyone meeting the term for the first time. Browse as long as you like; logging and favorites are the two things that ask you to create an account. A link to hamtrax.com/#/programs/repeaters/hunt opens that tab directly whether you're signed in or not.

The machines near you

There is no live spot feed here, and there shouldn't be — nobody spots a repeater. The panel is a directory: Nearby Repeaters, the machines Hamtrax knows about within 50 miles of you, closest first — up to a hundred of them, which is more than any operator can reach.

The header says how many are in range and how far it looked ("Within 50 miles of you"), and the machines you've starred float to the top of the list ahead of everything else. Below the favorites, rows run in order of distance.

How Hamtrax knows where you are

Signed in, the list opens on your saved location — the same one Location sets in Station setup and in Settings — and it never asks the browser for a fix to do it. When that's the location it used, the header says "Showing results near your saved location" and offers Use precise location beside it; that button is the only thing on the panel that may raise a location prompt.

With no location to work from at all — signed out, or signed in before you've set one — the panel asks instead of guessing: "Where are you tuning from?", with Use my location and Location settings. Signed out, a fix taken that way is used for the lookup and kept nowhere: there's no account to save it to.

Two other answers are possible, and both offer a way forward rather than a dead end. Nothing within 50 miles offers Search 150 miles. A directory that hasn't finished loading onto this device yet says so and offers Try again.

What a row tells you

Each machine reads top to bottom in the order you'd work it — what to dial in first, who and where afterwards:

• A favorite star, at the far left of the top line, with the status badge opposite it
• The mode, on the line below and at the row's full width — the mode family (FM, DMR, D-STAR, C4FM, and compounds like P25/FM). It leads the machine's details because it's what decides whether you can work the machine at all
• Output frequency — what you'd dial in
• Offset · tone — the rest of the access details, in one quiet line: the signed offset in MHz (−0.600) and the CTCSS tone (both values when encode and decode differ). Anything the directory doesn't publish for that machine simply isn't there — an unlisted tone shows nothing rather than a blank label
• Callsign, then where it is — the machine's identity and its city, as the directory publishes it, set apart at the foot of the row
• Distance from you, in miles, closing the row at the bottom right beside the callsign
• A status badge — NEW or Worked — in the top-right corner

NEW and Worked

A machine you've never logged a contact through carries a NEW badge. One you have carries a green Worked badge — Worked ×3 once you're on your third contact through it — and the whole row picks up a faint green wash, so a scroll down the list separates the collection you already have from the machines still to work.

That count reads your whole logbook, not just this session, and it counts contacts, not machines: three contacts through the same repeater is Worked ×3, because on a repeater every one of those is a real QSO. The only evidence it accepts is a contact Hamtrax filed under this program with a readable machine reference — nothing is inferred from a frequency that happens to match.

Browsing signed out, every row reads NEW. There's no logbook to measure against, so nothing is claimed either way.

Favorites

Tap the star and that machine sorts to the top of the list from then on, on every device you sign in from — the home machine, the club machine, the one that covers your commute. Tap it again to remove it. You can keep up to 100 favorites per program. Signed out, the star asks you to sign in first, because a favorite has to be saved to an account.

The map beside the list

The map doesn't stop at the nearby hundred — it carries the whole directory, every machine Hamtrax knows about, anywhere you pan. Zoomed out, machines gather into cluster bubbles sized by how many they hold; tap a bubble and the map zooms in until it splits apart, the same way the Park Explorer unpacks its parks. Close in, every machine stands as its own pin. Hover over a pin and it names itself, in the same order the list rows use — the mode on a small gold tab across the top, then the output frequency, a quiet offset · tone line, and the machine's callsign and town closing underneath; anything the directory doesn't publish simply isn't shown. On touch, tapping a pin pins that same card in place.

The nearby list and the map stay in sync: hovering a row highlights its pin and hovering a pin highlights its row, and machines you add yourself appear on the map like any other.

There are no quick status buttons on a repeater pin the way there are on a POTA or DX spot. Those act on a station on the air, and a repeater pin is a machine, not an operator.

The pin's card is the whole answer

There is no separate page behind a machine, and there doesn't need to be one. A repeater is a short list of settings, and the card already carries all of them: the mode heading it, the output frequency, the published offset and tone, and the machine's callsign with the town it covers underneath. That's everything you need to bring the machine up. The row beside it in the list reads the same fields in the same order, plus how far the machine is from you in miles, so the two surfaces can't drift apart.

Signed in, the card carries one button — Log Contact — which fills the logging card at the top of the panel with that machine. Signed out there is no button at all: nothing is being withheld, there is simply nothing further to open. The button also steps aside while an activation is live, along with the rest of the tab's logging controls.

Every field is drawn from the directory, and missing ones fail quietly: a machine whose tone or offset is unpublished shows neither. Hamtrax would rather tell you nothing than tell you a repeater has no tone when it simply hasn't been recorded.

Logging a repeater contact

A repeater row identifies a machine, and a machine identifies nobody — so unlike a POTA or DX spot, this can't be a one-tap Contacted. It's one tap plus the callsign.

Tap Log on a machine's row. The Manually add contact card at the top of the panel opens with the machine, its output frequency, and its mode already filled in — FM when the machine runs a mode the quick card's list doesn't carry — and the cursor waiting in the Callsign field. Type the callsign of the station you worked and Hamtrax looks them up as you type, filling in their name and location — and saving the name onto the contact. Add reports, adjust the date and time (they default to now, in UTC, and can be back-dated), add a comment if you like, and tap Add Contact.

The contact saves through the same door every hunt uses, so a cloud-rejected save announces itself the same way — see Logging a Hunt Contact.

Every contact counts

Repeaters deliberately does not use POTA's once-per-day rule, or DX's once-per-band-and-mode rule. Every repeater QSO is logged.

The reason is what repeaters are for. You might catch the same operator on the morning drive and again on the way home, work a net check-in and then a ragchew through the same machine, or say hello to the same friend on the same repeater four days running. Those are four contacts, not one contact repeated, and a logbook that collapses them has thrown away the log.

The one thing Hamtrax still refuses is an exact re-log — the same callsign, through the same machine, at the same time — which is a double tap or a re-import, not a second QSO. It says so plainly: "already logged at this exact time — every repeater QSO counts, so only an identical re-log is skipped."

Digital voice: DMR, D-STAR, and C4FM

A contact through a digital machine is logged as a digital contact. The full contact form's Mode list offers DMR, D-STAR, and C4FM alongside SSB, CW, and FM, and Hamtrax stores what you pick the way ADIF says to: MODE=DIGITALVOICE with the flavor in SUBMODE. That's what exports, that's what re-imports cleanly, and that's what other logbooks and award programs can read — while the contact still reads as "DMR" everywhere in the app, because that's the word an operator uses.

The quick card in the Repeaters panel offers the standard analog and data modes, so a digital contact logged from there is finished by opening it in your Logbook and setting Mode to its digital flavor.

Where repeater contacts are filed

Every repeater contact files into a UTC-month folder listed on the Repeaters card in your Logbook — "August 2026", created automatically on your first repeater contact of the month. Repeaters only hunts, so like DX Chasing its card has no Hunting subheading: the months are the card. The card appears in your folder tree with your first repeater contact, so a logbook without one stays exactly as it was. (One exception: a brand-new, empty logbook shows every installed program's card as a starting point.)

Those months belong to Repeaters alone. A repeater contact can never land in a POTA or DX month, and neither of those can land in a repeater month — the same hygiene guardrails that keep every program's folders clean.

While you're activating, repeater logging stops

Start a POTA activation and the Log buttons disappear from the nearby list, the map glyph's Log Contact action goes with them, and the Manually add contact card is replaced by a card naming the park you're activating and explaining why: POTA's rules don't count a contact made through a repeater toward an activation. Offering to log one would be offering you time that can never score.

This is the one place Hamtrax stops you rather than filing you correctly — and it stops you only here, on the Repeaters tab, only while exactly one activation is actually live, and only for contacts dated inside that activation's UTC day. Back-date a repeater contact to a day the activation doesn't claim and nothing is blocked.

If you made the contact and want it in your log anyway, the way through is the deliberate one: open your Repeater contacts card in the Logbook, open the month, and add it there. A card opened on a folder is bound to that folder and never consults your activation, so the contact files into its repeater month exactly as it would have. Nothing about it can reach your activation's log, then or later — the folder guardrails reject a repeater contact in an activation folder outright.

The card also carries End activation, for the case where the activation is finished and you'd simply forgotten to close it.

Imported contacts reach these folders only when the file explicitly says so — an ADIF SIG of REPEATER, which is what Hamtrax writes on export. Nothing is guessed from a frequency or a callsign, so a lifetime of 2m contacts imported from another logbook is never quietly reclassified. See How contacts are sorted.

The map of machines you've worked

Your profile's Showcase carries a Repeaters card, and it isn't a list of folders — it's a map, one pin per machine you've ever contacted. A month folder can tell you "August 2026, 12 contacts" and nothing at all about which machines carried them, and the machines are the entire story of repeater hunting. (The months stay exactly where they are in your Logbook tree.)

The card's map is a still picture; tap it and the same map opens full-screen and interactive. Tap any pin there and it centers, then names itself: the machine, where it is, and how many contacts you've made through it.

Above the map, one line states what it counts — All time · whole logbook — because the same profile also lists your repeater months, and the two are measuring different things. Every contact carrying a valid repeater reference is on this map, whether you logged it here or imported it. Machines the directory can no longer place get no guessed pin; they're still counted, just not drawn.

Like every Showcase section, it carries a Public / Hidden switch for your public station page. It starts Public — it's new, so nothing you hid in the past was ever an opinion about it — and hiding it hides only this card.

The directory itself

The machines come from hearham's openly licensed repeater directory — 17,838 operational machines worldwide in the current snapshot, cleaned of dead entries, junk frequencies, and duplicates before it ships.

That snapshot travels with the app and is stored on your device rather than fetched machine by machine, the same way the POTA park catalog works. The first load unpacks it in the background; after that the nearby list is answered locally, which is what makes it usable in the places you actually need a repeater — a valley with one bar of signal, a parking lot, a trailhead.

One honest note: coverage is uneven. It's densest across the United States, with thousands more machines across the United Kingdom, France, and the rest of the world — but a quiet area may genuinely list nothing within 50 miles, and no directory of a moving target is ever complete. Which is what the next section is for.

Adding a missing machine

Under the nearby list — "Know a machine that's missing?" — and again in the empty state when a search finds nothing, sits an Add a repeater action. It's placed after the rows on purpose: you discover a machine is missing right where you just finished reading its neighbours.

The form asks for what a machine actually needs:

• Repeater callsign and Output frequency (MHz) — required, because together they are the machine's identity. Type them however you like (w0erh and 442.1, or 442100); Hamtrax converges them to the canonical W0ERH 442.100
• Offset (MHz) and Access tone — both optional. Offset is signed, like -0.6; the tone takes CTCSS (103.5) or DCS (D023) form. Leave either blank and the machine simply reads as unpublished, exactly like the bundled entries that don't publish one
• Mode — chosen from a closed list: FM, D-STAR, DMR, C4FM, P25, NXDN
• City, Latitude, and Longitude — required, because coordinates are what put a machine in anyone's nearby list. These are the repeater site's coordinates, not yours; Use my location is there for when you're standing at the site (or close enough to it) and fills them from your location

Everything is validated before it's sent, and the same rules run again on Hamtrax's servers, so a form that looks accepted can only bounce for the two things your browser can't know: a race with another operator submitting the same machine, and the daily limit. Submissions are capped at five per account per day — enough for an evening of tidying up your area, not enough to paste a directory in. Hit it and the form says so and asks you to come back tomorrow.

Two rules are worth knowing before you tap Add to directory. A machine already listed is refused rather than duplicated, whether it came from the snapshot or from another operator. And a valid submission goes live for everyone immediately — the form says so up front — rather than waiting in a review queue. That's a deliberate trade: a machine you add tonight is in your nearby list, and everyone else's, tonight.

Because of that, an added machine carries a small grey User-added badge on its row, beside the NEW or Worked one. It's the honest distinction — hearham's entries have been checked by the wider community for years, and yours hasn't yet. Everything else about the machine behaves exactly like any other: the nearby list refreshes the moment your submission saves, so the machine is right there among its neighbours, on the map as well as in the list, showing the same pin card, taking a favorite star, earning worked badges, and logging contacts the same way. And on the one thing that could go wrong — an added machine colliding with a bundled one — the bundled entry always wins.

Adding a machine needs an account; signed out, the button asks you to sign in first.

Defaults in Settings

Settings → Preferences → Hunting keeps a default Mode and Band for every hunt program you have installed, each on its own labeled row. Parks on the Air and DX Chasing start blank; Repeaters is the one row that arrives pre-set — 2m and FM, the band and mode nearly all repeater work happens on. Change it or clear it like any other, and your value is what sticks.

Because this panel is a directory rather than a spot feed, it carries no band or mode filter bar for that pair to seed — it's the program's stored default rather than something narrowing the nearby list.

Related Pages

• Hunting -- The POTA side of the same panel: live park spots, filters, and hunt logging.
• DX Chasing -- The other program without an Activate side, and the other custom Showcase map.
• Folders & Labels -- How program cards and monthly folders organize your contacts.
• Logbook Hygiene Rules -- The guardrails that keep repeater, POTA, and DX months separate.
• Importing Contacts -- How imported contacts reach repeater monthly folders.
• Your Profile -- The Showcase card your worked-machines map lives on.
• 2D Map -- Map interaction, markers, and popups.