How a Jikita is found
This is the part that is genuinely different from a phone, and it is worth understanding — both because it explains what a tag buys you, and because it explains something your own phone is doing for other people.
Three independent paths
A Jikita can be located by any of three routes, and they do not depend on each other.
1. Long-range radio
The tag transmits on a low-power, long-range network — the kind used for industrial sensors, where a single receiving station covers a large area of open terrain.
This works with no phone involved at all. Where there is a receiving station in range, a tag can report from a valley with no mobile coverage whatsoever.
2. Other people's phones
This is the one people do not expect.
Every phone running myJikita reports every Jikita it hears — not only its owner's. If a stranger's phone comes within Bluetooth range of your tag, it notes what it heard and passes it on the next time it has coverage.
So a tag in a place with no mobile coverage can still be located, by the simple fact that somebody walked past it and later came back into signal. No app was opened, nobody was asked, nothing was noticed.
Your phone does this for other people too. It is automatic, it costs you nothing noticeable, and one day it may be the reason a stranger is found. The exact data involved is described in Who can see your position.
3. Rescue teams' own equipment
Rescue services operating in the area can detect and home in on a tag with their own direction-finding equipment, independently of any network. That is a capability of the rescue organisation, not of this app.
Why that combination is strong
Each path fails in different circumstances, and they rarely fail together:
| Needs your phone? | Needs mobile coverage? | Range | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long-range radio | No | No | Kilometres, where there is a receiving station |
| A passing phone | No | Only later, on the passer-by's phone | Bluetooth range — tens of metres |
| Rescue equipment | No | No | Deliberately long, at close of search |
Your own phone — the thing everything else in myJikita depends on — appears in none of these rows. That is the point of carrying a tag.
What a sighting contains
When a phone hears a tag, what is passed on is:
- The tag's own broadcast, exactly as it was heard, unaltered. The phone is only a courier; nothing it interpreted is sent. The broadcast carries the tag's identity, its status, its battery and its own last known position.
- How strong the signal was, which is a rough indication of distance and is the one thing the tag's own message cannot carry.
- When it was heard.
The tag's message is cryptographically signed by the tag itself, so a sighting can be verified as genuine rather than taken on trust from whichever phone submitted it.
It works offline too
A phone that hears a tag in a white area buffers the sighting and sends it when coverage returns, exactly as it does with its owner's own positions. The time it was heard is carried along with it, so the sighting is still accurate when it eventually arrives.
This is precisely the case that matters: the tag was heard where there was no signal, which is where somebody most needs finding.
What this means for you
If you carry a tag: keep it on your body, keep its battery healthy, and know its serial number. Those three things are the whole of your side of it.
If you do not carry a tag: your phone is quietly part of how other people are found. You will never see it happen.
If you are reporting someone missing: say that they carry a Jikita, and give the serial number if you know it. It changes what a search team can do. See Calling for help.
Next: Jikita troubleshooting