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Planning an outing

The plan is the information attached to your outing: what you are doing, where, when you will be back, and which way you intend to go. It is filled in before you start, takes under a minute, and is what turns a moving dot into something somebody can act on.

Why each field matters is argued in What a good plan contains. This page is how to fill it in.

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File: img/myjikita/plan-02-form-empty.png Shows: The outing plan form, empty, with all fields visible.

Activity​

Choose the activity from the list — hiking, trail running, ski touring, climbing, mountain biking and so on. It sets the expectations everyone else reads your outing against: pace, terrain, and what "late" means.

Place​

Free text. Write what you would say to a friend: the summit, the massif, the refuge, the trailhead.

Your activity and place are composed into the title your contacts see, so they read "Ski touring · Pointe de Chalune" rather than a timestamp.

Expected return time​

The time you expect to be back and to stop the outing.

When you pass it without stopping, the outing is marked overdue, and the people following you are told. That is the mechanism that turns your silence into an alarm without anyone having to decide to be suspicious.

  • Set it realistically, not optimistically. False alarms are expensive in a way that is hard to undo: they teach your contacts to ignore you.
  • If you are running late and everything is fine, send a message in the outing thread rather than leaving the alarm to fire.
No expected return time means no overdue alert

The app cannot tell that you are late if you never said when you would be back. Everything else still works — but the single most useful automatic signal is switched off.

Planned route​

Attach one of the GPX routes from your library. It gives you three things:

  1. It is drawn on your map, and works offline.
  2. It enables off-route warnings — the app tells you when you have drifted more than about 200 m from the line.
  3. It gives a rescue team a corridor to search instead of an area.

Import routes before you leave — see GPX routes and tracks.

Attach the route before you start

A route can only be attached when the outing is created. If you start an outing while a route is still uploading, that outing will not have one. Let the import finish first.

Participants​

If several of you are out together, record who is on the outing. It tells anyone watching — and, if it comes to it, a rescue team — how many people to expect, which changes how a search is run and what is sent.

Only the phone that started the outing is sending positions. Listing participants describes the party; it does not track them individually. If two people in the group both want to be tracked, both should start their own outing.

Changing the plan​

Plans change. You can adjust the outing while it is running — for example pushing back the expected return time when the descent is slower than you thought. Anyone following you sees the update.

The route is the exception: it is fixed when the outing is created.

Then share it​

Choosing contacts and starting the outing is covered in Sharing your position.