Since 2019 it has become apparent that many people have not been properly prepared for Expo.
Since 2019 it has become apparent that many people have not been properly prepared for Expo.
This is what you need to do:
Phones assume that you are walking along streets, or running along tracks or cycling. They are very, very bad at making the right guesses on the Totes Gebirge plateau.
Do not 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.
This is all explained by Google here.
On the plateau, this "high accuracy" mode will simply give you the wrong position if it can't get an excellent GPS fix (but we only need a "good" one). There is poor cell tower reception too, so trying to use that for location is just as bad.
What you want is GPS and only GPS (more precisely GNSS: which includes GPS, Glosnas, Beidou, Galileo etc.).
If you do not have a good GPS fix, you want to know that, not be given some confabulated guesstimate by whatever some programmer for Apple or Android thought your might want.
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 Airplane Mode when on the plateau, and re-start your GPS app after you do so.
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.
Also, Google Photos is for TEMPORARY sharing only *. Archival storage must be done by uploading to the website using the "Upload Photos" page on the website.
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:
We have a separate page specifically on recording cave entrances by GPS in the survey handbook.
So that we can spend less time looking for the body in horrible conditions...
[someone write this is a less frightening way, please?]
You will probably be familiar with real-time, continuous sharing of location using Google Maps or Apple, but there are several apps that do this.
Note that you do want continuous location sharing, so that when you fall down a hole and lose signal, we know where the top of the hole is.
You will probably be familiar with real-time, continuous sharing of location using Google Maps or Apple, but there are several apps that do this.
Note that you do want continuous location sharing, so that when you fall down a hole and lose signal, we know where the top of the hole is.
If recording a track, you do not 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.
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 bring a phone backup battery with you on expo.
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).
detailed instructions depend on the type of phone and the version of Android - someone fix this ?!
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.
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.
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.
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".)
So unless the photo is utterly trivial and disposable, please also upload the photos using the "Upload Photos" page on the website before you delete them from your device.
We would rather you didn't use Google Photos at all really, but people will willy-nilly, so let's at least use the same Google photos album each year.
This is a whole other thing entirely. It is much more complicated than you might think to do it to proper 'expo' standard. See our Locating entrances by GPS page.