SMS Locators – New Search and Rescue Feature
First Responders: Display and monitor a subject’s location in your map with SMS
Update: This feature can only be created on the web version of the program at this time. You can not yet send the text from your mobile device.
Have you ever been talking to a lost person on the phone, but can’t get an accurate location for them? Have you had a subject tell you their coordinates, but it turns out they are in another state? How about a time when a patient is injured and finding them rapidly could make all the difference?
The recipient gets this screen after opening the link.
We’ve just added a new feature to team accounts that can help with all of those situations: SMS Locators. With this feature, you can quickly send a text to the missing person. Assuming that person has a smartphone with a cell signal, they can open a link that they receive in a text and send their location to a saved CalTopo map. Then anyone viewing that map can see the location of the user. The location will continue to update long as the user doesn’t close the page or leave cell service or turn off their device. Through the whole process, you never have to leave SARTopo/CalTopo.
This is a huge feature for helping to find missing persons, or to help responders navigate to a scene without delay. It can also potentially be used to locate a lost party, then verbally guide them out, all the while watching their progress in real time on your map. This could mean you don’t have to deploy teams to resolve a situation, perhaps instead talking the subject through their own rescue.
All members of a team account with a data connection can see the location of the lost or injured person, so each responder can navigate directly to that person without entering coordinates into their device by hand. Each responder can see their own location as well as that of the subject.
Additionally, this is all done within the CalTopo app, so responders benefit from the many other features of using CalTopo, such as satellite imagery, parcel data, and roads and trails on a variety of different base layers. Plus team leaders can view the location of all of their responders at the same time and on the same map.
To use this new feature, you must 1.) be a part of a team account subscription, and 2.) be working from a saved map. As long as these conditions are met, you can go to +Add, choose “locator”, then choose SMS locator.
Once you’ve sent the text and the subject opens the link, you’ll start to get a track.
View the subject’s track live in your map.
Additional information for the status of the locator is available, so you can see that the link has been activated, when the last update took place, and even send another message to the user (it’s a one way system though.)
Here’s where things really get useful: any team member can open the same map via the mobile app, and navigate to the subject. Here we see a mobile app user finding the app track in the map items list. In the next image, the app user has their location turned on and is pointing more or less in the direction of the sms user.
If you are using a team account, go try it out! The best way to figure it out is to use it.
I can’t wait to test this out.
I am not seeing the SMS option in the add locator dropdown menu yet. iPhone Version 0.7.1.0 (no newer versions listed in app store)
At this time the text can only be initiated from the web.
So if the person is out of mobile range, thus not getting the originally sent out SMS, and then eventually (could be soon or days later) they get to a spot with coverage – will the attempt at locating them still be active with that original SMS sent or does the link time out after a certain period of time? If it times out, then does the message attempt need to be sent out by the team account more than once?
The link is active as long as the request object is on the map.
This is fantastic! Will it be possible to add this locator from within the App in the future as well?
Is this coming out in the app version 7.11? 7.10 doesn’t appear to have that locator option and was just curious if we could look forward to it being in the apps as well as the website version of sartopo. I ran a test and it works really good and the locator does show up on the phone apps now in 7.10, you just can’t create it from there (that I have seen).
This will be a great tool. The only problem is that you have to have location services turned on for your browser on your phone. Mine was turned off and so was the setting in the phone of someone else that I tested it with. The person will get this error
GPS Error:1:User denied Geolocation.
You need to tell the lost person to go to Settings-Privacy-Location Services then turn it on for Safari Websites. Not sure about Android phones.
You need more than 80 characters if you want to include instructions.
It seems like the locations will not broadcast to another map in an event. Is there another setting or just not possible yet.
This features is attached to the map it is created on, and always will be. To have the subject’s location on multiple maps at the same time, you would need to send multiple links.
These are the instructions I provided for our team who is testing this capability:
I have changed my default browser in iOS to a different browser from the default of Safari. To get the SMS Locator working, the user will need to change privacy settings on their selected browser to allow location services in that browser. To do this, on the iPhone, go to Settings / Privacy / Location Services then select your browser app and make sure it is NOT set to “Never”. You can select either “Ask Next Time” or “While using the App” (which is what I chose). I also allowed “Precise Location” but that may not be available on everyone’s device.
To start tracking the subject, Where do we find the SMS Locators (text message with link) to send to the subject? Sorry I do not see that. thank you
On a saved map, go to Add, then locator, then sms locator.
Julie, thanks I am sorry but I do not see the sms locator, the only options under the Locator option are APRS, email, and fleet (on one of our saved maps in SARtopo)
You must be connected to a team account to have access to this feature.
Gotta do it from the web page and not from the app. Not provisioned to the app yet.
Is there a way to cancel the locator? Meaning, after the MP is located, even after deleting their locator from the sartopo map, if they have the web browser open still it will republish their location back to the team map. Is it possible for someone from the team account to somehow cancel the locator?
I have been testing this and it works well but I have a question. You can check on the status of a LOCATOR request but it shows “delivered” however, in doing some tests this DOES NOT mean the missing person received the request. So we cannot use the LOCATOR as a means to check if the cell phone is still functioning. Any thoughts ?