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title: Map & Waypoints

parent: User Guide

nav_order: 6

last_updated: 2026-09-01

description: View node positions on the map, create and share waypoints, manage map layers and Site Planner, and control position sharing and privacy.

aliases:

• map

• waypoints

• gps

• location

• site-planner

• map-layers

• geojson

• kml

The Map screen shows the geographic positions of nodes on your mesh, along with shared waypoints.

The map displays:

• Node positions — colored markers for each node reporting location

• Waypoints — shared points of interest

• Your position — your current GPS location

Each node that reports a position is shown as a node chip marker displaying the node's short name. The chip is colored by the node's own identity color (a stable color derived from its node number) — the same chip used in the node list, so a node looks the same everywhere. Marker color does not encode online/offline status. When a node's position updates live, its marker briefly pulses. Nearby markers are clustered as you zoom out.

• Zoom — pinch or use +/- buttons

• Pan — drag to explore

• Center — tap the location button to center on your position

• Node tap — tap a node marker to view details

The floating toolbar provides quick access to the compass, the map type and layers pickers, node filters, Site Planner, and location tracking. Tap the compass to reorient north-up, or tap the location button to center on your current position. On Google Play builds a refresh button joins them while a network layer is showing; on F-Droid and Desktop, refresh a network layer from its own row in the layers sheet instead.

!Map floating toolbar with compass, filter, refresh, and location controls

Tap the filter button in the floating toolbar to open Filter map. Display controls what is drawn: Only Favorites, Show Waypoints, Show Precision Circles, and a slider that hides nodes not heard from recently. Node roles is a chip per device role, plus All to show every role; a selected chip means that role is shown. Nodes narrows the set further with Hide offline nodes, Only show direct nodes, Exclude MQTT, Show ignored nodes, and Include unknown.

A dot on the filter button means at least one filter is hiding something — check it before concluding the mesh is quiet. Turning Show Waypoints off hides every waypoint, including your own. Show ignored nodes adds them to the map rather than showing only them — unlike the node list's Only show ignored Nodes.

Waypoints are shared points of interest, visible to everyone on your mesh.

Your radio must be connected — the map ignores a touch & hold while it is not, because saving a waypoint means broadcasting it.

1. Touch & hold the map at the desired location.

2. Enter a name and optional description.

3. Choose an icon/emoji for the waypoint.

4. Tap Send to share with the mesh.

Waypoints always broadcast to the whole mesh on the primary channel. Unlike a message, a waypoint cannot be addressed to one channel or sent as a direct message.

Overlays can be toggled on top of any base map, from the layers sheet:

• Weather radar — NOAA NEXRAD reflectivity (US coverage)

• Hillshade — terrain relief, on F-Droid and Desktop only. Useful for understanding why a

link fails, since LoRa range is limited by terrain

Any XYZ tile endpoint can be added as a base map, on every flavor and on desktop. Open **Manage Custom

Tile Sources** at the foot of the base map picker and paste a URL template using T383838{z}, T383838{x} and T383838{y}

— plus T383838{s} if the provider uses rotating subdomains. A national mapping service, for example:

T282828

Tiles are cached on disk, so panning does not re-download what you were just looking at.

On Android, the same screen also imports a local T383838.mbtiles archive for fully offline use.

On F-Droid, select a vector base map first — Liberty, Positron, or Dark — since a download is defined

against a vector style and Start Download stays disabled over a raster one. Frame the area you want on

screen, then tap Start Download in the layers sheet: that creates a paused pack covering the current zoom

plus two levels deeper. Press play on the pack's row to actually download it.

On Google Play, the layers sheet's Offline Manager section downloads its own offline regions instead

— water, roads and administrative boundaries extracted from the public Protomaps basemap dataset, drawn

directly as map shapes rather than raster tiles. Frame the area you want, tap Start Download, and once

it finishes flip Show on map to draw it (it's off by default so it never surprises you by covering up the

live map). You can still import a pre-made T383838.mbtiles archive here too, as before. Desktop has neither.

An Offline pill appears over the map whenever the device has no network connection. On Google Play

builds, if you've imported a local T383838.mbtiles archive, the map switches to it automatically the moment the

network drops — no toggle to remember — and switches back once you're reconnected, as long as you haven't

picked a different base map yourself in between. On F-Droid, a downloaded offline area keeps rendering on

its own; the pill is purely informational there. Desktop has no offline downloads at all yet, so the pill

is informational there too.

• Nodes — view and filter your node list

• Node Metrics — signal quality and position history for individual nodes

• Local Mesh Discovery — traceroute and neighbor info for understanding mesh topology

• Units & Locale — distance and coordinate display formats