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Coverage and white areas

A white area is a place where your phone had no usable network connection. myJikita records them as you go and shows them to you afterwards.

This is one of the more quietly useful things the app does, because almost nobody knows where their own coverage gaps are, and they are not where people assume.

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File: img/myjikita/coverage-01-white-areas.png Shows: A finished outing's track with the no-coverage sections marked.

How it is recorded​

Every time the app takes a position, it also tries to send it. That attempt is itself a coverage measurement, made at a known place and a known time — so the app gets a coverage map for free, without scanning for networks or doing anything extra to your battery.

  • Sent immediately → you had coverage there.
  • Could not be sent → the position is stored on the phone and marked as a white area. It is sent later, when there is a signal, still carrying the time and place it was actually taken.

Nothing is lost by being out of coverage. It arrives late, not never.

What you see while you are out​

The outing card tells you whether everything has reached the server, and how many positions are still waiting. A growing queue means you are in a gap.

That is worth knowing at the time, because it answers the question "can anyone see me right now?" — and the answer changes what you might choose to do.

What you see afterwards​

At the end of an outing, your track shows where you had coverage and where you did not.

Read it honestly, because it is telling you something about your safety arrangements. If a third of your day was a white area, then for a third of your day:

  • Nobody could see where you were, in real time.
  • You could not have sent an SOS or a message, at the moment you pressed it.
  • You could not have made an ordinary phone call either.

That does not mean the app failed. It means your phone is not a rescue beacon, which was always true — the app is simply the first thing that showed it to you.

What to do about a lot of white​

In rough order of cost:

  1. Tell somebody more precisely where you are going. Free, and it is the thing that does most of the work. See What a good plan contains.
  2. Use a longer position interval, and check the queue at high points. If you know where your signal is, you can deliberately stand there for a moment and let the queue drain.
  3. Carry a Jikita tag. It is findable by other people's phones and by rescue teams' equipment, independently of whether your phone has a network. It closes part of the gap.
  4. Carry a satellite device — a PLB or a satellite messenger. If your regular ground is genuinely without coverage, this is the honest answer, and the coverage map is the evidence that you need one.
Why this feature exists at all

It was in the product from the beginning for precisely this reason: so that somebody can look at their own real terrain and decide, on evidence rather than on optimism, whether a phone is enough.

Emergency calls are different​

A white area in myJikita means this phone could not reach its own network to send data. An emergency call to 112 can be carried by any operator's mast, not only your own, and needs much less signal than data does.

So: no data does not always mean no emergency call. If you are in trouble, try 112 anyway. An SMS also gets through on far less signal than an app can use.