Battery and tracking interval
GPS costs battery. A tighter track costs more of it. myJikita lets you choose where on that line you want to sit, and the honest answer is that it depends on the day.
Choosing an interval
Settings → GPS update interval. The choice is how often a position is taken and sent, from 1 to 10 minutes.
File: img/myjikita/battery-01-interval.png
Shows: The GPS update interval setting, with the high-battery-drain warning
shown for a short interval.
| Interval | Worst-case gap in your last known position | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | About 10 minutes of travel — several hundred metres walking, much more on skis | Long days where battery is the binding constraint |
| 5 min | A few hundred metres | A sensible default |
| 2 min | A tight track | Exposed or complex terrain |
| 1 min | The tightest the app offers | Short, serious sections — and automatically during an SOS |
The app warns you when you pick a short interval, because the battery cost is real and it is better to know before the day than after it.
During an SOS, tracking switches to its fastest rate whatever you chose. That is not negotiable and it is the right trade.
How to think about it
The interval decides how much of your route is unknown if you stop sending. At a ten-minute interval, a search starts from a point you may have left ten minutes ago — which on a ridge is a small circle and on a ski descent is a large one.
So: match the interval to the consequence, not to the whole day. A long approach on a valley track is fine at ten minutes. The exposed traverse in the middle is worth two.
Making the battery last
The app is built to be economical — positions are taken on a schedule rather than continuously, the map does not run in your pocket, and the Jikita tag update rides along with the position tick rather than running its own timer. The rest is the phone and the cold.
Before you leave
- Start at 100 %, and carry a power bank on a long or cold day.
- Download your offline maps at home. Downloading in the field is expensive in both battery and data.
- Pick your interval deliberately.
While you are out
- Keep the phone warm. This is the big one. Lithium batteries lose capacity sharply below freezing, and an inside pocket against your body can easily be the difference between a phone that lasts the day and one that dies at 40 %. A phone in an outside pocket at −10 °C can go from 60 % to nothing in minutes.
- Leave the screen off. Tracking does not need the screen; checking the map every five minutes is what drains the battery, not the GPS.
- Turn Bluetooth off if you do not carry a Jikita tag.
- Airplane mode is a poor idea. It saves power by making you invisible, which is the opposite of the point. If you must, remember the queue only drains when the radio comes back.
What not to do
- Do not use the system battery saver on Android as a substitute for a power bank — it is the mechanism most likely to suspend background tracking. See Permissions.
- Do not swipe the app away to "save battery". That stops tracking completely.
A phone hunting for signal is a phone draining fast
Worth knowing because it is counter-intuitive: a phone in a marginal signal area uses more power than one with no signal at all, because it keeps boosting transmit power looking for a mast.
If you are having a long day in poor coverage and battery is becoming the constraint, airplane mode does genuinely save a lot of power — at the cost of nobody seeing you at all until you turn it off. That is a trade worth making consciously, and worth telling your contacts about in a message first.
If the battery dies
Tracking stops. The positions already sent are still there, and your contacts still see your last known position and the time it was taken.
This is one of the cases a Jikita tag is for: it has its own battery, measured in months rather than hours, and stays findable after your phone has given up.