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.
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WHat you need to do seems to be correlated with how expensive your phone is. A Xioami Redmi 12 phone in 2024 worked with just the OSMand and battery saving fetures disabled as described above. But in 2025 a Blackview Wave8 phone would not produce a useable OSMand track at all until the "GPStest" app (see below) was also run continuously and with notifications and logging enabled.
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Calibrate/document your phone's capabilities
Install the "GPS Test" app, this one: GPS TEST 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).
+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). [ Philip Balister takes a screen-shot of the GPStest screen whenever he want a proper GPS location. A notebook and pencil are also valuable adjuncts when looking at lots of entrances: use the timestamp on the screenshots to correlate everything. ]
Temporary Google Photos
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".)
