Repeaters

Repeaters is the tab for the contacts most of us actually make: the ones through a repeater. It sits in the sidebar as its own row, beside the Parks on the Air group and DX Chasing, marked by a repeater tower.

Where POTA hunting revolves around parks and DX chasing around countries, this tab revolves around repeaters. 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 repeaters 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 repeater you've worked three times, on a map of the repeaters you can reach.

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

You can browse the repeaters 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. It opens around a useful nearby starting area when one is available, and falls back to Chicago, IL otherwise. A default-collapsed What are repeaters? explainer sits directly beneath the title. The top card puts that browse area on the left and the quiet repeater total on the right, directly above Search by area, with a centered Use my location action beneath the field. That top card uses the same lighter, continuous smoked-metal program-owner chassis and neutral rim as POTA and DX; the darker directory rows remain visually subordinate below it. Browse as long as you like; logging or adding a repeater asks 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 repeaters near you

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

The row above search names the active browse center on the left and shows only the quiet repeater total — for example, 100 repeaters — on the right. The directory still searches within 50 miles; that radius no longer repeats in the label. Rows run in order of distance.

The rows themselves arrive 20 at a time. When more than twenty repeaters are in range, previous and next controls sit below the last card with the range you're reading between them — 1–20 of 100 — so the closest few are what's on screen instead of the top of a long scroll. Twenty or fewer and those controls don't appear at all. The total above search never changes with the page: it keeps counting every repeater within the radius, not the ones in front of you.

Anything that runs the lookup again puts you back on the first page, nearest first — a new Search by area, an accepted Use my location fix, a flight back to your own location, Search 150 miles, or Try again. Paging works the same way on Park Explorer, which uses this panel too.

Choosing the browse area

Signed in, the list opens on your saved location — the same one My Location sets in the Hunt panel and in Settings — and it never asks the browser for a fix to do it. Search by area can temporarily browse another town without changing that saved location.

Signed out, the public tab starts from a useful nearby area when one is available and uses Chicago, IL as its dependable fallback. That starting point lasts only for the open page and never becomes an account or contact location. The top card names the active area on the left and shows the short repeater total on the right, directly above Search by area; the quiet Use my location action is centered beneath the field. Searching replaces the starting point with the town you chose; Use my location is the only action that may raise a browser location prompt, and a successful fix replaces the starting point across the list, center label, and map together. Neither action changes account preferences or the location saved on a contact.

If a signed-in account has no location to work from, the panel offers Use my location, Manage location in settings, and, below an or, the same Search by area field. That remains a choice rather than an automatic device request.

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 — including a lookup that ran out of time — says so and offers Try again.

What a row tells you

Each repeater keeps its identity, radio settings, and location in three distinct bands so the list is easy to scan. Every row uses the same rounded dark-metal chassis: a 1.5px metallic bezel around a smoked identity header, near-black body, and smoked information footer. The header divider is lit only at its two ends and fades away entirely across the middle of the card; the footer has no divider at all and is set apart by its own smoked surface. The band ribbon and Worked or operator-added badges never recolor or remove an edge:

• Mode and callsign together in the smoked-metal identity header, ordered Mode → callsign, with an optional Worked badge opposite them
• A quiet, half-bright top-edge ribbon derived from a recognized amateur band — 2M, 70CM, and so on — or Repeaters when the output frequency falls outside Hamtrax's band table
• Mode as plain text in that identity line — yellow by default and blue for digital modes
• A borderless Receive / Transmit row, set just below the header with a small breathing gap. Its two clean columns use the same compact segmented readout and bright neutral text as the main headings regardless of mode. The frequency you transmit on is calculated from the published offset beside it, and the arrow between them makes the direction explicit
• The offset, centered under that row, followed immediately by the published access tone on its own centered line (both tone values when encode and decode differ). Hamtrax does the arithmetic so you don't have to add the offset in your head, and shows the offset anyway so you can check it
• A repeater the directory publishes no offset for has no separate transmit frequency to name, so the Transmit side shows a quiet dash and the available access details remain below. Anything the directory doesn't publish simply isn't there
• City and distance, closing the row together, with a small location pin immediately before the city
• A one-line caveat when the coordinate is approximate — quiet, dim, tucked under the city, on the repeaters whose published position isn't the tower. Most rows carry nothing here at all; see how precise the coordinates are
• Log at bottom-right when logging is available, after the repeater's tuning and location details
• A Worked status badge in the top-right corner only after that repeater appears in your log

Worked

A repeater you've never logged a contact through carries no status badge. One you have carries a Worked badge — Worked ×3 once you're on your third contact through it. The badge uses the same bright neutral text as the card heading, while the row keeps exactly the same 1.5px metallic bezel and smoked header/body/footer surfaces as an unworked repeater.

That count reads your whole logbook, not just this session, and it counts contacts, not repeaters: 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 repeater reference — nothing is inferred from a frequency that happens to match.

Browsing signed out, no row carries a status badge. There's no logbook to measure against, so nothing is claimed either way.

The map beside the list

The map doesn't stop at the nearby hundred — it carries the whole directory, every repeater Hamtrax knows about, anywhere you pan. Zoomed out, repeaters 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.

Repeater clusters let go earlier than the app's other maps do, and the directory's own moves — the public opening flight to its starting area, Search by area, an accepted Use my location fix, and a signed-in flight back to you — land past that point on purpose. You arrive on individual repeaters rather than on a handful of anonymous bubbles floating over a street map, with about a zoom level of slack in hand before anything gathers back up. That's a deliberate pairing: the zoom the map lands on and the point at which clusters release were chosen together, because either one on its own puts you straight back on bubbles.

Hover over a pin and it names itself — the smallest segmented output-frequency readout with plain mode text beside it; the mode text is yellow by default and blue for digital modes. A quiet offset · tone line follows, then a divider before the repeater's callsign and town, with the approximate-coordinate line below the town when the repeater has one; anything the directory doesn't publish simply isn't shown. The pin and list row use the same directory data, but group it for their different jobs: the row is a tuning instrument, while the compact pin card is a quick map answer. On touch, tapping a pin pins that same straight dark card in place. Pinning it also fades the other pins out until you dismiss it; hovering over a row in the list still brings that row's own pin back.

The nearby list and the map stay in sync: hovering over a row highlights its pin and hovering over a pin highlights its row — and repeaters 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 piece of equipment, not an operator.

When several repeaters share one point

More repeaters share a coordinate than you'd guess. A club runs its 2m and its 70cm rig off the same tower, so both publish the same latitude and longitude — and, for reasons the directory section gets into, whole towns are sometimes geocoded down to a single point. Across the directory, 42.6% of repeaters sit on an exact coordinate they share with at least one neighbour.

That used to mean the ones underneath were simply gone. 28.5% of the directory rendered exactly beneath another repeater's pin — not hard to hit, but impossible: you could neither tap one nor hover over it, at any zoom the map would go to. Zooming in couldn't rescue them either, because clusters separate by distance on the ground, and two repeaters at the same coordinate are zero metres apart forever.

Now that shared point keeps one pin — exactly where the directory put it — and the pin says how many repeaters are on it. A small number rides the glyph: 3 for a tower carrying three machines, nothing at all for a repeater standing on its own. Hover over that pin, or tap it, and its card opens as a stack, one card per repeater, each with its own output frequency and mode, its own callsign and town, its own offset and tone, and its own Log Contact button. A tall stack scrolls, so a tower carrying more repeaters than fit on screen still hands you every one of them. And the nearby list is the backstop throughout: every repeater in range is a row, whatever the map is doing with its pin.

The effect is worth stating plainly: every repeater that used to be buried is now reachable, and none of them had to be moved to get there. A pin still marks the spot the directory published rather than a place beside it, so a club's 2m and 70cm machines read as two radios on one tower instead of two towers a street apart.

The pin's card is the whole answer

There is no separate page behind a repeater, 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 output frequency with mode beside it, the published offset and tone, and — after a divider — the repeater's callsign with the town it covers underneath, plus the one quiet line that appears when the coordinate is approximate. That's everything you need to bring the repeater up. The list row uses those same fields in a dedicated borderless Receive / Transmit row, adds the calculated transmit frequency and distance, and keeps identity and location visually separate.

Signed in, the card carries one button — Log Contact — which fills the logging card at the top of the panel with that repeater. 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 repeater 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 names a piece of equipment, not a person — 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 repeater's row. The Manually add contact card at the top of the panel opens with the repeater, its output frequency, and its mode already filled in — FM when the repeater 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 repeater, 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 repeater, 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 repeater 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 Repeater contacts card in your Logbook — "August 2026", created automatically on your first repeater contact of the month. The card is titled Repeater contacts rather than Repeaters, because what it holds is contacts; the sidebar row, the map card, and Settings keep the program's own name. Repeaters only hunts, so like DX Chasing its card has no Hunting subheading: the months are the card. Each month row puts the repeater tower — the same line icon the Repeaters tab and sidebar row wear — to the left of its title, so the program stays recognizable before you open the folder. 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.)

The card's title line carries its own tally on the right — a folder icon with how many repeater months you have, and a person icon with how many contacts they hold — counting Repeaters alone. See Folders.

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.

Repeaters and your Showcase

Repeaters is deliberately absent from your profile's Showcase. There is no Repeaters card there, no map, and no Public/Hidden switch for one — the Showcase is a curated surface, and a month card reading "August 2026, 12 contacts" says nothing about which repeaters carried them.

Nothing on this page changes because of that. Your repeater contacts, their monthly folders, the worked badges on the directory rows, and everything you export are all exactly as described above; the months live in your Logbook tree, which is where you work with them.

The directory itself

The repeaters come from hearham's openly licensed repeater directory — 17,830 operational repeaters 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 repeater by repeater, 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 repeaters 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.

How precise the coordinates are

hearham publishes one latitude and one longitude per repeater and no accuracy field of any kind — which quietly invites you to read every pin as a surveyed tower site. About a third of them aren't. Measured on the snapshot that ships with the app, 5,728 repeaters — 32.1% of the directory — are demonstrably somewhere other than the antenna. Hamtrax works out which ones when the snapshot is built, and then says so, rather than letting a confident-looking pin do the lying for it.

There are three ways a coordinate goes soft, and each gets its own line in the small dim type — on the nearby row under the city, and on the map pin card under the town:

• "Approximate — grid square IO93bl" — 1,494 repeaters, 8.4%. The point is the exact center of a six-character Maidenhead subsquare, a box a few kilometres on a side: the source published a grid locator and somebody converted it to a point. These are almost entirely UK repeaters. The square Hamtrax names is the real one, recovered from the coordinate itself, so you're told exactly how big the box is rather than just that there is one
• "Approximate — city center, not the site" — 2,370 repeaters, 13.3%. Three or more different callsigns sit on one identical coordinate. Clubs share towers, but they don't share them three and four operators deep — a crowd on a single point is a town that got geocoded
• "Approximate — rounded to about a mile" — 1,864 repeaters, 10.5%. The coordinate was published to two decimal places or fewer, which is roughly a kilometre of slack before you start. This one clusters by coordinator: Florida and Minnesota account for most of it

The middle class is the reason any of this exists. Those coordinates look surveyed — the Kansas City one runs out past six decimal places, a resolution of a few inches — and sixteen different callsigns are sitting on it. No amount of counting decimal places will ever catch that; the only thing that gives it away is noticing the crowd. Across the directory, 167 cities with four or more repeaters have every single one of them on one identical point.

Two things this is deliberately not. It is not a correction — nothing is moved, nudged, snapped, or rounded. The coordinate you see is the coordinate the directory published; the line beside it only tells you how much weight to put on it. And it is not Hamtrax guessing. The grid test is pure geometry — it never reads hearham's prose — and yet it lands on exactly the repeaters whose own description already says "Location is approximate": all 1,494 of them, nothing extra, nothing missed. That agreement is the proof that it's reading the data rather than inventing a story about it. The other two classes have no such note anywhere upstream, which is precisely why they needed finding.

Repeaters whose coordinates are clean show no accuracy caveat at all. The small location pin beside every town simply labels the locality; it is not an accuracy warning. Silence beneath that locality means the map pin is where the repeater is, and that's the common case.

The unsatisfying part is that the missing precision isn't Hamtrax's to supply. RepeaterBook's terms explicitly forbid public repeater directories and maps, so its data can't be used here whatever it might contain; OpenStreetMap, checked repeater by repeater, would improve eleven records. There's no licensed source with better coordinates waiting to be plugged in. So the label isn't a placeholder for a fix that's coming — it's the truthful answer, and telling you the pin is a town center beats drawing it as if it were a tower.

Adding a missing repeater

At the top-left above the nearby list — there from the moment the list starts loading, and again in the empty state when a search finds nothing — sits + Add repeater. It stays above the list because a full page of rows and the paging controls beneath them fill the panel: anything below that is a scroll nobody makes. And it doesn't wait for the rows, because a button that appeared only with them used to nudge the whole list down the moment loading finished.

The form asks for what a repeater actually needs:

• Repeater callsign and Output frequency (MHz) — required, because together they are the repeater'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 repeater 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 repeater 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. A repeater added this way never carries an approximate-coordinate line, and never will — you gave it a real position for a specific site, which is exactly the thing the bundled entries sometimes can't

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 repeater, 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 repeater 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 repeater you add tonight is in your nearby list, and everyone else's, tonight.

Because of that, an added repeater carries a small bright neutral User-added badge on its row, with Worked beside it only after you've logged a contact through that repeater. 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 repeater behaves exactly like any other: the nearby list refreshes the moment your submission saves, so the repeater is right there among its neighbours, on the map as well as in the list, showing the same pin card, earning worked badges, and logging contacts the same way. The one difference runs in your favour — its coordinate is never labeled approximate, because you typed the site's own, rather than inheriting a town that somebody geocoded years ago. And on the one thing that could go wrong — an added repeater colliding with a bundled one — the bundled entry always wins.

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

Defaults in Settings

The Filters card under Settings → Preferences → Map — the second card in that section — shows a summary row with the default Mode and Band for each hunt program. Parks on the Air and DX Chasing start unset, so their rows simply read All; Repeaters is the one row that arrives pre-set, reading Mode: FM · Band: 2m — the band and mode nearly all repeater work happens on. Select the Repeaters row to change or clear only its pair. Each change saves automatically, and Done closes the editor.

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 one with a 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 -- What the Showcase does and does not carry; Repeaters is not on it.
• 2D Map -- Map interaction, markers, and popups.