<p>Phones assume that you are walking along streets, or running along tracks or cycling. They are very bad at making the right guesses for the Totes Gebirge plateau.
<p>Do <em>not</em> select the "high accuracy" location setting on your phone. Mostly this will snap your position to the nearest cafe or bierstube: by default it will use the nearest WiFi it can find and assume that you are there, and will ignore the perfectly reasonable GPS position it has recorded directly.
<p>This is all explained by Google <ahref="https://support.google.com/maps/answer/2839911?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform=Android">here</a>.
<p>On the plateau, this "high accuracy" mode will simply give you the <em>wrong</em> position if it can't get a decent GPS fix. There is poor cell tower reception too, so trying to use that for location is just as bad.
<p>What you want is GPS and <em>only</em> GPS (more precisely <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_applications">GNSS</a>: which includes GPS, Glosnas, Beidou, Galileo etc.).
<p>If you do not have a good GPS fix, <em>you want to know that</em>, not be given some confabulated guesstimate by whatever some programmer for Apple or Android thought your might want.
<p>If all that config sounds too tricky, or if you have done it but are not confident that it works, just put your phone into <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_mode">Airplane Mode</a> when on the plateau, and re-start your GPS app after you do so.
<p>When you share photos on your phone to the Expo photo sharing site, by default, the location of those photos will be stripped out. So all those lovely pics of intriguing cave entrances you snapped on your walks are now utterly useless.
<p>Google Photos is for TEMPORARY sharing only <ahref="#temp">*</a>. Archival storage must be done by uploading to the website using the <ahref="/photoupload/">"Upload Photos"</a> page on the website.
<p>So, before expo, perhaps while sitting in a traffic jam around Munich or on the train from Bad Ischl, take a moment to photograph your travel companions in an embarassing pose and fix the this:
<li>Go to Apps on your phone, select Google Photos, and allow the app to access Location on your phone (NOT "precise" location) when the app is in use.
<p>Even if you have no intention of using your location or recording a track, the camera in your phone will record locations of your photos which are extremely useful to future expeditions - for reasons which only become apparent when you yourself try to work out what someione did 10 years previously.
<p>Your <em>camera</em> will use the same location settings as the rest of your phone, but sometimes with a bit of a delay. We have lots of examples of geo-located photos where the recorded location is alctually the location of the <em>previous</em> photo because someone has taken a quick photo but the phone hasn't had time after waking up to get a location, so it uses the previous one! And doesn't tell you!!
<p>So when taking a photo of an entrance, always take one photo; delete it, and take another. This will give your phone a chance to get synchronised properly.
<p>ALSO: always take 3 photos of any entrance, the obvious one about 10m away, a scene-setting one from 20 or 30m away, but also a really close one of 3 to 5m away, so that we can see if rocks have moved around the entrance and also for a much better identification in future. If there is a tag, <em>always</em> take a close-up photograph of it so that the letters are readable.
<p>If recording a track, you do <em>not</em> want your phone to decide to go into "energy-saving mode" (the default if you are not actively interacting with your mapping app, such as OSMand) as it will drop location points and your recorded track wil now gaily bound over impenetrable chasms, rendering it rather useless for finding your way home in thick cloud.
<p>Unless you have already done a couple of days with your phone set into "continuous GPS mode", you have no idea how long your battery will last. So if you haven't already practiced this on a fell in the UK, you need to <b>bring a phone backup battery</b> with you on expo.
<p>You can buy phone battery backups in Austria, but they are a bit epxensive, and hard to find in Bad Aussee (only available in 2024 in the "chemists" opposite the post office and down the hill a bit, which has a range of electronics stuff).
<p>If you have standard battery saving set up, when you start up OSMand and start recording a track, it will do a popup telling you about how to turn off battery saving.
Install the "GPS Test" app, this one: <ahref="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.gpstest">GPS TEST</a> and check whether your phone is using SBAS "Satellite-based Augmentation Services", which is another name for EGNOS, the differential GPS system.
You need to record if SBAS is in operation whenever you record the position of a cave entrance (and ideally whenever you take a photo too, but that would be unrealistic).
<p>When anyone shares photos on a "Shared Album" in Google Photos, they are only visible so long as the original photographer keeps the photos on their device: there are loads of photos by Harry Kettle from 2023 which are visible only as blank rectangles on the Shared Album because he has cleared out his photo album on his google account. (This really is a "share" not an "upload".)
<p>So unless the photo is utterly trivial and disposable, please also upload the photos using the <ahref="/photoupload/">"Upload Photos"</a> page on the website <em>before</em> you delete them from your device.
<p>We would rather you didn't use Google Photos at all really, but people will willy-nilly, so let's at least use the <em>same</em> Google photos album each year.
