Location Sharing

The location sharing capabilities are designed to be used within a team of four where there is a navigator who has been trained and assigned to maintain accurate location by checking in at known waypoints from time to time.

Note: The location sharing feature is only available when using a UWB Tracking Unit.

Capabilities

• Share Check-ins - use if the navigator is able to check in at visually known points. Check-ins are shared for 30 seconds. Sharing stops before that if the user moves more than 10m.
• Auto share type
  • None - No Auto-sharing unless “Share Check-ins” is enabled.
  • GPS - Continuously shares GPS. Use this if the user (or vehicle) has higher quality GPS. GPS is not shared if the GPS location uncertainty is greater than 50m.
  • Location - Continuously shares user locations to improve accuracy. The navigator uses this if they check in more frequently or otherwise maintain a better location. Location is not shared if the uncertainty is greater than 50m.

  When auto-sharing, the battery life is diminished to about 4 hours.

• Enable Dropped UWB Beacons - enable this to use UWB drop beacons. The beacon location will not be programmed if the user location uncertainty is greater than 10m. See this article on dropped beacons for more information.

UWB ranging uses power, and ranging is stopped when the user location estimate (error bounds) has too much uncertainty. When the uncertainty grows larger it diminishes the usefulness for improving location accuracy.

Sharing Mode

The sharing settings are located in the NEON settings page, which can be accessed from the three dots menu.

In order to use the UWB sharing capabilities, the user must select a sharing mode: subscription, or custom.

If the user is operating with an offline tracker, they must use the custom option and enter in a channel and secret. UWB sharing and dropped beacons are filtered so that they only affect users with the same channel and secret. The secret is generated by hashing a password. A password can be created by any user, but each user in a group must type in the same password. The hash is shown for validation but is not the value entered in the custom secret field.

Auto Share Type

Auto share type allows a user to share GPS or their own location.

• Share GPS if the user has high-quality GPS and others do not. This allows the user to continuously share the good GPS location with other nearby users.
• Share location if the user is paying attention to the location, for example, the user is acting as a navigator and updating the position from time to time. This allows the user to maintain a good location and share it with other users more frequently than just at the moment the user performs a “check-in”. This should only be used by a trained navigator who is likely to check in at the correct locations, and should only be enabled by one member of the team.

It is recommended that the user choose to either auto share locations/GPS or use the drop beacon functionality. In this example, the user is auto-sharing GPS and has UWB drop beacons turned off. The GPS received by the navigator is shared with the other users.

Share Check-Ins

The squad navigator may check in at visually known points on the map to update location. If share check-ins are enabled, the squad navigator’s location will be shared upon check-in with others in the squad. Check-ins are only shared with others in the same share group.

Dropped Beacons

See this article on dropped beacons for more information.