Field manual · 05/17

Pins & Shapes

Everything you draw on the map is an item, and every item lives in a layer. Pins, labels, photos, elevation readings, routes, areas, circles, rectangles and freehand sketches all share the same editor, the same styling and the same export path.

creating items

The Add tab draws at the crosshair: position the map, pick a type, place your points. The Items tab creates the same things from a form, which is faster when you are copying coordinates off a sheet of orders.

A named point with a description, colour, icon and altitude. It can carry photos, PDFs, files and voice memos.

Polyline / Route

A multi-point line with live length as you build it, an elevation profile, and per-segment readouts if you style it as measured.

Polygon

A closed area with live area and perimeter.

Circle

A centre and a radius. Also the shape you geofence most often.

Rectangle

A box by width and height — a grid square, a search box, a drop zone.

Label

Text drawn directly on the map instead of a symbol, with its own text colour, background and size. For naming a feature, an area or a phase line.

Photo

A picture drawn on the map as a bordered thumbnail at the position it belongs to.

Elevation / Depth PRO

A saved terrain reading. An elevation point records ground height; a depth point records water depth. Each carries the date it was read and a note that the value is modelled reference data — not a survey, and not a nautical chart.

Freehand

Choose how you draw first: Draw with Finger sketches strokes straight onto the map, while Draw with Cursor keeps the map pannable and draws the line at the centre crosshair as you move — the steady option on a vehicle mount. A cursor stroke ends after a short pause; undo removes a whole stroke at a time.

Directions PRO

A generated route between points, following roads or trails. See Navigation & Directions.

+ Pin on the drawing bar drops a named waypoint on the point you just placed, so a route gains its checkpoints while you build it rather than afterwards.

Long press the map to drop a pin where you pressed. Change this to Move Crosshair There, or switch it off, in Settings → General → Map Long Press.

Pins, a polygon, a circle and a route drawn on the map with NATO symbols — Pins and shapes

the item editor

Every item opens the same form. A pin shows:

Title: The name drawn on the map when item names are shown
Description: Free text, carried into exports
Coordinate: Tap to set — type it, or take it from the crosshair
Altitude: In your altitude unit, with an Auto-fetched value from terrain data
Color: The symbol colour
Background: The plate behind the symbol
Text Color / Text Size: For labels
Icon: The built-in library, an APP-6 symbol or one of your own
Icon Size: 50 % to 150 %, in 10 % steps — shown when an icon or APP-6 symbol is selected, so one pin can be made to stand out
Folder / Tags: Filing and cross-cutting labels — see Items, Folders & Tags
Attributes: A free-form table of extra fields — see below
Preview: How the item will actually look on the map
Add Attachment: Camera, Photo Library, Files or Voice Memo

icons and nato symbols

The built-in library

130 glyphs grouped into activities, animals, places, vehicles and general markers. 28 of them are free — plain dots and outlines, the activity set, the animal set and a handful of places — and the rest are part of Pro.

APP-6 / NATO symbols

The full military symbology set, searchable, with affiliation chips for Friend, Hostile, Neutral and Unknown. Changing affiliation reshapes and recolours the frame the way the standard requires, and the label colour follows.

Custom icons PRO

The editor's Custom Icons section loads your own PNG, JPEG or HEIC images from File or Photo. They are stored with the app, travel inside exported layer bundles and are written into KMZ, so a custom symbol set survives being handed to someone else.

Symbol search matches the translated category name as well as the English entity name, and folds case and accents — so searching in your own language finds the right group even though APP-6 entity names are English by definition.

attachments

Add Attachment in a pin's editor takes five kinds of file:

Kind	Notes
Photo	From the camera or the library. Downscaled to 2048 px and re-encoded as JPEG; files already within that stay untouched, so a screenshot is not smeared.
Video	Record Video on the spot — up to one minute — or pick a clip from the library or Files, up to three minutes. Clips are transcoded down until they fit, so a long 4K recording does not bloat the item.
PDF	Orders, a scanned map extract, a datasheet.
Voice Memo	Recorded on the spot with a level meter, then kept or discarded. AAC, mono, up to ten minutes.
File	Anything else from Files, including an audio file you recorded elsewhere.

The in-app camera geotags

A photo taken from the pin editor is stamped with the position, altitude and both true and magnetic heading — so the picture records where it was taken and which way the camera was pointing.

Attachments sync through iCloud with the item and are deleted with it. A layer whose pins carry attachments exports as a ZIP bundle rather than a plain file, and KMZ export embeds photos and voice memos so they survive the trip to another app.

HEIC always converts to JPEG on import, so an exported bundle opens outside Apple's ecosystem.

An attachment added to an existing pin is saved immediately, unlike the text fields. On a new pin it is saved with the pin, and discarded if you cancel the draft.

attributes

Every item — pin, line, area or shape — carries an Attributes table: a free-form list of name-and-value fields for anything the standard form does not have a box for. A frequency, a grid-square code, a casualty count, a sensor reading, a source reference.

Editing

The editor's Attributes section adds a row at a time — an Attribute Name and a Value — with Add Attribute for the next and a minus button to drop one. The item's details screen shows the table read-only when it has any.

Attributes round-trip through the data formats: they are written into KML <ExtendedData> and read back from it, and they map to a GeoJSON feature's properties. A layer you import from another GIS keeps its attribute columns, and a layer you export carries yours out. See Import, Export & Backup.

The attribute table is held on the device alongside the item and, since the latest data model, syncs with it through iCloud. It is a free feature — no Pro upgrade is needed to add, edit or import attributes.

line and shape styling

A polyline can be drawn in six styles:

Style	Use
Solid	The default line
Arrow	Direction of travel or of attack
Dotted	A planned or notional route
Dashed	A boundary or phase line
Dashdot	A second class of boundary
Measured	A solid line carrying a distance and azimuth capsule and a direction chevron on every segment

Measured is what the measuring tools draw and what they save as, so the leg-by-leg readouts outlive the measuring session. The measurement summary lists every leg in turn — Leg 1, Leg 2 and so on, each with its own distance and bearing — a route card you can read straight off the map.

The style picker shows abbreviated names because six styles no longer fit one row; the circle and rectangle editors have more space and spell out Solid, Dotted, Dashed and Dashdotted in full.

Circles, rectangles and polygons additionally offer:

Fill Color: The interior, independent of the stroke
Width: Stroke weight
Radius / Width / Height: Exact dimensions in your units
Notify on: Turns the shape into a geofence
Elevation Difficulty: Gentle, Easy, Moderate or Steep

Settings → General → Show Item Names On Map draws names next to shapes as well as pins.

geofences and pin alerts

Set Notify on in a circle, rectangle or polygon editor and the shape starts watching for you. Triggers are Enter, Exit or Both, and the alert arrives as a notification even with the app in the background.

Per-pin proximity alert

A pin can watch for you too, without drawing a shape. Switch on Proximity Alert in the pin editor, set an Alert Radius (default 100 m, down to 10 m) and a Notify on trigger — Enter, Exit or Both. It behaves like a circular geofence centred on the pin, and the approach tones below apply to it as well.

Approach tones

Settings → Route Navigation → Geofence Approach Tones adds audio. The radius is split into three rings at full, half and quarter distance. Crossing inwards plays one, two or three rising beeps; crossing outwards plays a wrong-way beep, doubled when you leave the outer ring. Inside the innermost ring it goes silent. Tones are at least four seconds apart.

Geofences arm only for the active, visible layer. Hiding a layer disarms its alerts and lets the app stop holding background location for them. This is deliberate and matches how the rest of the app is scoped — only the active layer is drawn, searched, navigated and exported.

While the app is in the background purely for geofencing it drops to a coarse location accuracy rather than full navigation precision, which is much easier on the battery.

A geofence breach can also be posted to your TAK server — see Team — TAK Server.

editing on the map

Tap an item to open its details, then edit to move points, restyle it or rename it.

Vertex editing

Tap a saved line or area and choose Edit on Map to work on its points in place. Each vertex gets a square handle; tap one and a capsule appears with Move Here (snaps the vertex to the crosshair), + Point (inserts after it), − Point (removes it, down to the two-point or three-point minimum) and Done. Edit via Form opens the same item as a list instead.

Connect to Pin

Tap a saved pin and choose Connect to Pin…, then pick another, and a measured line is drawn through them — named for its endpoints and carrying the distance along it. A quick leg between two known points without drawing by hand.

Project Waypoint

Project Waypoint… on a pin computes a new point a bearing and distance away from it, with a Back Bearing option — the way to plot "1 200 m on 073 from the OP" straight off an existing pin.

Dropping a pin on a shape's vertex links the two. Deleting the shape afterwards asks whether the linked pins should go with it — see Items, Folders & Tags.

Several pins can be recoloured or re-symbolised at once from the Items screen's selection bar, without opening each one.

The free version allows three pins and one route per layer. Shapes — polygons, circles and rectangles — are unlimited, so geofencing and area work are fully usable for free. See Free vs Pro.

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