Add Location to Your Messages

Aloha and welcome. I'm WH6AZ. I'm here to bring you a high signal inside about radio mail, the win link application I created. Let's get to it. Today's topic how to automatically add location to your messages. This functionality was first introduced in Winning Express about a year ago and just recently been added to radio mail. It's a powerful addition where you can essentially stash your latitude and longitude coordinates in your message header. This allows the recipient to map any incoming messages. Why is this important? Well during emergencies people might send urgent messages and they forget to include their location or they might enter it incorrectly and having automatic automatic location data is a huge help for incident management as it allows them to map every report that is coming in. With that functionality location can now be added to any messages not just limited to forms that have a dedicated location field. So let's dive in and see how it works. By default the location is turn off so let's switch it on. So we go into settings include location and turn it on. Now I'm gonna go ahead and compose a message. I'm gonna send it to my friend more Cooney and I'm just gonna post it here and send it. Alright now let's switch over to Winning Express and see what it looks like on the receiving end. Most likely Yo-Yo-C when you're running an incident is going to run a version of Winning Express. Has you know great mapping capabilities and whenever to see where the messages are coming from. So let's see how that looks like. I'm gonna go ahead and open a session here, retrieve my email and here we go. Here's the message we received. First thing you can notice here is the location header has been added. If you'll notice it says GPS because that's the device that was used to actually place the data in the header. There could be other things there. We'll get to that in a minute. Okay now let's see what it looks like on the map. I'm gonna go and click the map icon here and select from messages. You can select other things here if you have forms that have location information that's where you would select but in this case we're gonna ask for any message that came in with the form with the location data. And I'm gonna display it on Google Map. And here you see two things on the map. The green pin represents your current location here. In this case this simulated WinLink Express user because it's running Windows. It's in Redmont by Microsoft and the blue is the message we sent from the iPhone which is running iOS from Apple and it's in Cupertino. And you can hover the pin here and you can actually see the message sender a bit of information as well as the subject. So now let's see let's go ahead and reply and we'll see what the location information looks like on the other side. So I'm going to reply to this message here. I'm gonna say good to hear from you and send it back. Exchange the session and it sends. So now I can jump here I will connect again looks like the message has not come through yet. So let's give it a few seconds. Let's try again. There you go I received the response. Okay and so here you'll notice next to the call sign of the sender there is a little icon and in this case around a circle icon represent GPS coordinates. If it's blue it means that they were actually derived straight from a GPS device and it's the most accurate coordinate you can get. If it's gray it means it was actually manually entered and let it be longitude so they could be a mistake or they could be kind of a rounding error so it potentially is less precise and this alerts you to the fact. So let's go tap on this and now actually see the location of the winning express user or Coney here and just place a pin I can see the coordinates and I can you know ask for direction or do other things this is just a regular map application from iOS. So you can also change how the location is determined in radio mail by default is using your GPS location but you can switch that off and provide a grid square instead so let's try that. I'm gonna go in settings location I will turn automatic and let's enter a grid square here somewhere in Hawaii. Now I'll go and create another message and I'm just gonna put it in the odd box I won't send it but if you actually see it you can see all the going messages and they will behave the same way as if you receive it. So here are the call sign of the sender and you'll see the icon now is actually gray and it's a square and this represent a grid square information which means that it will only provide you a neighborhood level or precision so when you bring it up on the map the location the coordinate will center in the square and this case looks like I actually put myself in the ocean so that was probably not a valid square but this basically tells you the general vicinity but you can't rely on it to a looping point that sender. That's it for today I hope you find this feature as powerful as I do and now go outside get on the air until next time 73 and aloha