Use the ViewRanger Buddy Beacon to share your location with your friends.
Sharing your location
To transmit your location you need to have created a ViewRanger server account. You'll be asked whether you wish to create an account when you access the ViewRanger server, or you can choose Options > Server > Create server account. You will select a user name and password.
To send your location once choose Options > Beacon & tracker > Send beacon now - you can use this to send either a map location or your GPS location.
You will be asked to enter a PIN number. This needs to be a number that you can reveal to other people. They will find out your location using your ViewRanger user name and your PIN.
You can change your PIN at any time, so it does not matter if you forget it. To change the PIN go to the Beacon section of Settings (on a keypad phone press the right cursor key several times to reach the Beacon tab). Enter the new PIN, it takes effect when you next send your location.
To send your location repeatedly choose Options > Beacon & tracker > Beacon repeat on. You'll be asked to choose a frequency, for example once every 10 minutes. The beacon will then be transmitted every 10 minutes (as long as the GPS has a position fix) until you stop it or exit.
Tip: If you use the Beacon a lot you can allocate it to one of your shortcuts - go to Options > Settings, then to UI. Set one of the "Function of N key" items to "Beacon repeat on". Then on a keypad based phone press that number key to start the beacon. On a touch screen phone touch the top left of the title bar to see the shortcut menu.
Viewing other people's locations
There are three ways to see other people's locations.
One way is to use a web page, http://www.viewranger.com/buddybeacon. They will need to enter your user name and PIN number.
The second way to locate a friend is within ViewRanger itself. ViewRanger stores a list of
people you have watched and allows you to associate an icon with them.
To locate someone choose Options > Beacon & tracker > Locate now. You'll see a list of
people you have watched before and an Add friend item. To add a new friend choose Add
friend and enter their username and PIN number.
ViewRanger will connect to the server, get their last known location and move the map to
show that location. Their icon will be shown at the screen centre and the time they were
at that location is shown at the top of the screen.
To manage the buddy list choose Options > Beacon & tracker > Buddy & tracker list.
You can add, delete and edit buddies and can set icons.
To create your own icon make a small bitmap image, for example a JPG or PNG file,
and put it in the E:\ViewRanger\Icons\ folder, which you may need to create, E: being the
memory card. If the bitmap is named charlie.png, then the icon will be named charlie. If your
friend's name is charlie then that will be used as the default icon.
The final way to locate a friend is using the Facebook application.
Additionally, there are three advanced ways you can directly access your BuddyBeacon
page.
Store and display multiple positions
You can tell the ViewRanger server to store multiple positions, so people can see your track.
To do this, login in to www.viewranger.com/portal - note you use your email address not your user id. The first time you log in you must fill in the profile form - if you don't you may see an error message.
To tell the server to store your track switch on "Record Beacon Track" and press the Save button.
Below the switch the number of points you have stored are reported. For example, "1031 Beacon Track Points Recorded".
To clear the history press the "Clear All Beacon Tracks?" link.
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