Everyday use
Once a tag is paired there is almost nothing to do. This page is the almost.
Main menu → Jikita lists your tags.
File: img/myjikita/jikita-04-tile.png
Shows: A Jikita list entry with its name, serial, presence dot, battery
level, beep button and radio-check button.
Presence — is it with me?
Each tag shows a presence indicator: green when your phone can hear it right now, grey when it cannot.
This costs nothing. The app is simply listening for the broadcast the tag makes about once a second; it never has to connect to the tag to know it is there. Walk away and the dot goes grey on its own within a few seconds.
Presence is always live. A tag last heard an hour ago shows as absent immediately, not briefly green — you must be able to trust the dot at the trailhead.
Before you set off, glance at the list. Green dot, decent battery. That is the whole pre-flight check, and it answers the only two questions that matter: is it actually on me, and will it last the day.
Battery
Shown as a percentage, straight from the tag's broadcast. The tag also raises its own critical battery flag, which is a better signal than any threshold the app could apply to a number — the device knows its own chemistry.
Replace or recharge when it says so, not when you get round to it.
Beep — finding it in the last few metres
Tap the beep button and the tag makes a noise.
This is for the last stage of looking for something you have mislaid: the bottom of a rucksack, under a car seat, in the wrong jacket. It needs the tag to be within Bluetooth range — in practice, the same room.
Beeping a tag does not alert anyone and does not put the tag into any kind of emergency state. It just makes a sound.
Radio check
The radio check asks the tag what it can hear.
It matters because everything else you can see about a tag comes from listening to it transmit. The radio check is the only way to know the tag can also receive — that its radio works in both directions.
Tap the radar icon; the check runs immediately and reports back within a few seconds. The tag answering at all is the result. The list of other tags it heard is secondary and will often be empty, which is normal if there are no other tags around.
Worth running once after pairing, and once before a serious trip.
File: img/myjikita/jikita-05-radio-check.png
Shows: The radio check dialog with its result.
Position and time updates
A Jikita needs to be told the time and where it is, and your phone is what tells it. Without that, the position in its broadcasts is empty and nothing it reports can be dated.
This happens by itself. While an outing is running, the app periodically hands the nearest tag your phone's current position and clock. Three things are worth knowing about how it does that:
- It rides along with the positions you are already sending. No second timer, no separate battery budget — tags refresh as often as your own track does.
- It updates the tag closest to you, one per cycle, rather than trying to reach every tag you own. The tag on your body beats the one in the car, and the one on your body is the one whose position matters.
- It never runs more often than every couple of minutes, even during an SOS when your own tracking speeds up. A tag whose clock is a minute stale is no worse off.
You will not see this happening, and there is nothing to configure.
If you carry more than one tag
All of them are listed, with their own presence and battery. Position updates rotate naturally between tags that are equally close to you, so several tags on one person all stay current without any scheduling.
A tag that is consistently further away is consistently skipped. That is intended: the tag on the wearer is the one that matters.
Next: How a Jikita is found