Map

The Map tab draws everything you hear — stations, objects, and your own beacons — on a vector basemap rendered on the device. This page is the reference for what the map shows and the controls around it.

The offline tile cache

Every tile you look at is cached on the phone, so areas you have visited redraw with no connection at all. The cache is capped at a size you choose — up to 10 GB — under Settings → Map cache; the default keeps about a region's worth, and the oldest unviewed areas are dropped first when the limit is reached.

The cache is browsing history, not a download: somewhere the map has never shown you is not available offline, and there is no whole-area download yet. If you are heading somewhere with no signal, pan and zoom around it first.

Real APRS symbols

Stations, objects, and beacons are drawn with their real APRS symbols, including overlay characters — a digipeater with an S overlay looks like one, not like a generic pin. Where markers overlap, tapping opens a picker listing everything at that spot instead of guessing which one you meant. Station labels appear at closer zooms to keep wide views readable, and a reset-north button appears only when the map is rotated.

Trails, and honest position history

The Trails layer shows where stations have been, following the same time window as the rest of the app. Tap any point on a trail for the exact time, position, and speed at that point — and the packet behind it.

Two cases where the map avoids implying more than it knows:

• A station that has not moved says "hasn't moved · N reports" instead of drawing a GPS-jitter scribble around its parking spot.
• A station transmitting with reduced precision (position ambiguity) is drawn with its uncertainty as a real box on the map — "somewhere in the 1 mile box" — with the size named in words, not a falsely exact dot.

Layers

The LAYERS panel toggles what is drawn:

• Trails — where stations have been.
• Weather radar — live NEXRAD precipitation radar. US only, off by default, and labelled with what it costs in data.
• Packet pulses — ring a marker the moment its packet lands.
• Digi paths — how a selected station was repeated.
• Live packet paths — animate each digipeated packet as it lands.

Watching packets travel

Select a station and the map animates the path its packets actually took, hop by hop through the digipeaters that repeated them — not a straight line from A to B, but the route the RF network really carried. With Packet pulses on, you also see each arrival as it happens: a marker rings when its packet lands. Together with the packet log, this is the fastest way to understand what your local digipeater network is doing.

Follow-me

The FOLLOW panel keeps the map centred on you, from either position source — GPS (where you are now) or Beacon (where you last transmitted) — and the map says which one it is following. Follow-me only uses GPS while the map is actually open; it never runs location in the background on its own.

Finding a station

From any station page, Find on map centres the map on that station and opens its card. The card shows the decoded essentials — symbol, position, ambiguity, movement, device, altitude, Mic-E status — with a link to the raw packet.

Placing things

Long-press anywhere on the map to put something there: Beacon from here creates a fixed-position beacon at that exact point, and Place an object creates an object beacon — an aid station, a meeting point, a net control — announced under your callsign.

What the map shows is filtered

The map obeys the same shared view filter as the Stations tab and the packet log: age window, RF or internet origin, and station kind. Set it once and it applies everywhere — see Stations for the details.

Related guides

• Your first beacon — put yourself on this map.
• Stations — the same data as a list, with full detail per station.
• Getting started — if the map is still empty.

Last updated 31 August 2026