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acma-register

The Australian regulator's licence register, for the ACMA repeater layer on the map

What it does

Installs one file, the Australian Communications and Media Authority's whole Register of Radiocommunications Licences (a zip of about 67.5 MB), under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/acma-register/. Nothing reads it on its own: hammunition maps repeaters import --from-acma takes the granted amateur repeater licences out of it, keeps the transmitters whose site lies inside your installed map regions, and writes them as a repeater layer for QMapShack, Navit and phones, named "Repeaters (ACMA, YYYY-MM-DD)" after the register's own date.

Why you would want it

It is the regulator's own record of every licensed amateur repeater in Australia, with each site's position and each transmitter's output and input frequency, under a licence that allows a derived map layer with attribution. On 2026-10-01 it held 1,784 repeater transmitters with a site position. It is the Australian source for the map; the WIA's directory is all rights reserved, and RepeaterBook forbids offline bundling. Outside Australia it adds nothing.

Before it will work

For the layer: at least one Australian map region installed (hammunition station set --map-regions australia-oceania/australia/tasmania and hammunition install osm-regions), because the import keeps only the repeaters inside the installed regions' bounding boxes. QMapShack and Navit show the layer when they are installed.

How it installs

  • the publisher's whole file from acma-rrl, rebuilt daily and unverified (no checksum is published; the zip's own CRC-32s and the tables its reader needs are checked); installed by name only (ACMA Register of Radiocommunications Licences, Licence to use the Register of Radiocommunications Licences, attribution required, https://cdn.acma.gov.au/rrl/spectra_rrl.zip)

Known problems

Unverified: the ACMA publishes no checksum and rebuilds the file daily, so Hammunition can check only that the zip is whole (every member's CRC-32) and has the tables the import reads. That catches a damaged download, not a deliberately altered one; the plan says so, and the unit is in no profile for that reason. A LAN mirror's copy is checked the same way, and over plain http nothing ties it to the ACMA. The download is the whole register (licences of every service, and licensees' names and addresses in client.csv) for about 1,800 repeater rows; the import never opens client.csv, but the installed file holds it, so do not pass the file on. Bounding boxes are rectangles: a box around one state can take in a neighbour's border sites. Tones are not in the register; offsets are paired from each licence's receiver, and a transmitter with no single receiver has none. The import reads 386 MB of CSV inside the zip and takes about 20 seconds on a laptop.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: reinstall
  • The ACMA rebuilds the file every day. Re-running hammunition install acma-register fetches the day's file (about 67.5 MB) and replaces the installed one; then hammunition maps repeaters import --from-acma rebuilds the layer from it. Repeater licences change slowly, so a month or a season between fetches loses little.

Where to get help with the software itself

The ACMA (info@acma.gov.au, as the register's own documentation gives it) for a wrong or missing licence record; the licensee for anything about the repeater itself. Hammunition only converts the file.

Source: catalog/packages/acma-register.yaml