[redgridtactical]

Haha fair point. In open terrain you get maybe 50-100m which I agree, not far. In practice it's more useful than it sounds though. You don't need miles of range when the point is "where did my buddy go 5 minutes ago." And if they walk out of range their last position and heading stick on your map as a ghost marker so you're not totally blind or left guessing.

[jdyer9]

This comment got me thinking that it might be worth using their second-to-last location to try and derive some vector. Obviously that's super informative as you already know the edge of the map they left, but maybe it's useful?

[sneak]

Yeah the range of BLE makes this an order of magnitude less useful or practical than a $50 LoRa transceiver.

[redgridtactical]

All true, but the tradeoff is zero additional hardware cost and zero setup. For a family hike, small team, or a hunting party staying within a few hundred meters of each other, pulling out your phones beats buying and configuring radios for everyone.

That said, BLE Long Range (Coded PHY) pushes it to 400m-1km and is on the roadmap for the next version. I'm also planning a Meshtastic bridge so if you already own LoRa hardware, the app can route through it for multi-kilometer range. Best of both worlds: works without hardware, works better with it. Would love some feedback if you ever try it out!