Chapter 7

The Map

The map shows every station with a position, coloured symbols, your own home marker, and a range of overlays. It is drawn on a fast canvas, so it stays smooth with hundreds of stations.

#Gestures

#Toolbar

A scrolling toolbar runs along the bottom of the map. From left to right:

#Base layers

Use Menu → Tools → Offline Tiles to pre-load an area before going somewhere without coverage. Downloaded tiles are used by the map automatically, and when the phone is offline they stand in for whichever layer is selected (chapter 18).

#What is drawn

• Stations with their APRS symbol (emoji or official sprite set). Overlay characters are drawn on top of the symbol. Weather stations always show the weather symbol.
• Age fading: full colour if heard in the last 10 minutes, 75% under an hour, 45% under three hours, 25% after that.
• Labels under each symbol. Objects and items are labelled with the object name, not the sender.
• Clusters below zoom 12 when stations are within 30 px of each other — a circle with the count.
• Trails — the last 30 positions of each moving station as fading cyan dots.
• Your home marker with your beacon symbol and callsign in yellow (blue in the light theme), and your own beacon trail in magenta (last 50 beacons).
• Filter circle — dashed yellow circle showing the APRS-IS range filter.
• Track Log (green, with a chequered flag at the start) and station track history (yellow) when you choose to show them.
• Waypoints (orange), KML points and lines, distance rings (cyan dashed), scale bar.
• At most 300 stations are drawn at once; the rest are still in the station log.

#Finding a station

Tap the magnifier and enter a callsign (with or without SSID). Find looks for an exact match, then any SSID of the same callsign, then the station log, and centres the map at zoom 14. If the station is unknown — perhaps outside your filter range — Search APRS-IS opens it on aprs.fi in the browser.

#Drop Waypoint dialog

Long-press anywhere on the map. The dialog shows the coordinates and Maidenhead locator of the point.

• Drop Waypoint — add a named waypoint (default name WPT). Waypoints are saved.
• APRS Object — create an APRS object at this point (chapter 12).
• More… → Copy Coordinates — copy the latitude and longitude to the clipboard.
• More… → Set Filter Centre Here — move your QTH / filter centre to this point.

#Map overlays (KML, KMZ and GeoJSON)

Menu → Radio Tools → Map Overlay draws a file on the map — an event route and checkpoints, a search area, club sites — exported from Google Earth, Google My Maps, geojson.io, a mapping app or an event organiser. It reads .kml, zipped .kmz and GeoJSON (.geojson / .json) files.

• Named points become map points with their descriptions.
• Lines are drawn in the file's own colours (KML line colour, or the GeoJSON stroke property); polygons are drawn as their outlines, and multi-part shapes are drawn in full.
• The map zooms to fit the overlay when it is loaded.
• The overlay stays on the map, also after the app is restarted, until you choose Map Overlay again, which removes it.

#Map replay

Menu → Tools → Map Replay plays the last hour, 6 hours or 24 hours back on the map: every station where it was at each moment, with its trail so far, faded by how old its position was then. Drag the slider to any time, ▶ / ⏸ to play and pause, 1m/s to change speed (1, 5 or 20 minutes a second), ✕ to return to the live map. It uses the positions the app has kept — up to 500 per station since it started. Live packets go on arriving while you watch and appear when you close it.

#Night mode

The ☽ button in the status bar is designed for night driving and dark-adapted operating: it switches to the dark theme and a dark version of the CARTO map and drops screen brightness to 15%. Tap ☽ again (or the theme button) to return to normal. Menu → Export → Theme Schedule can switch between the light and dark themes automatically at sunrise and sunset at your QTH (checked every five minutes).