Maps Location Madness

Have you ever been at a campground, pulled out your phone, opened maps, and found your location displayed far from where you should be? Maybe the map is still showing you at a campsite you just came from, or at another campground clear across the state. Sometimes your location can jump between several different spots each time you open maps. Needless to say this can get very annoying. Setting up navigation to a destination only 10 minutes away can result in your phone giving you an estimate of 4 hours or more as it has you coming from the wrong location. This is a problem unique to the mobile lifestyle, but what's going on here, and more importantly, what can we do to fix it?

First, a quick explanation of what's happening. Your phone is using a location shortcut knows as WiFi scanning. Getting a full GPS lock can be time consuming and battery draining, so often times your phone will scan the area looking for WiFi hotspots. It will then send a list of WiFi hotspots that it sees up to Google, who maintains a database of locations for each of these hotspots. Then they can send back down a rough location for you which is usually sufficient for most location requests. This can also be used to speed up the process of getting a more accurate GPS lock. This WiFi scanning method takes place even when you have WiFi turned off on your phone.

The problem arises when the list of hotspots that your phone sees includes mobile hotspots and routers in all the RVs parked around you (and even your own). There is an assumption made by Google that routers are generally stationary and can be used as fixed points for determining location. This is a pretty good assumption for more traditional homes and businesses, but doesn't work for RVers.

So what can we do to fix it? One solution is to disable WiFi scanning on your phone. The exact method for this will vary depending on manufacturer and OS version, but for most Android devices running version 6 (Marshmallow) or 7 (Nougat) open Settings / Location and then click the 3 dots in the upper right and select Scanning. This will take you to a screen similar to this:

Simply switch off the "Wi-Fi scanning" option to disable this feature. This will have the desired effect, but isn't ideal, as WiFi scanning really is a handy feature to have enabled. You'll find your maps takes longer to determine your location after opening with this turned off, and it could have some undesired impacts on 3rd party apps as well.

So what else can we do?

The solution I prefer is one that lets you exclude your hotspots and routers from Google's location database. This not only helps you, but other campers which might be within range of your signal. Unfortunately, if you are in range of someone else who hasn't done this, you may still occasionally be subject to incorrect location information. Since making this adjustment ourselves, we've only noticed this problem manifest one time: at the Full Time Families Rally in Tallahassee. Being around such a concentration of full time travelers, our location was bouncing around between 3 or 4 different cities. This inspired me to write this post in hopes that a few of these families would take this advice and help out themselves and their fellow travelers by implementing this simple fix.

The solution is to rename your router and/or hotpot's SSID to include _nomap at the end. For example, if your router's SSID is linksys, just rename it linksys_nomap. This is an indicator to Google that it should not be used for location services (or any other purposes). Originally I think this was added to help satisfy privacy advocates and give people a way to keep Google from collecting data about them, but it works nicely for our purposes as well. Routers that are frequently on the move, like ours, are less than useful in a database used to help pinpoint location, so it's doing everyone a favor to rename them and get them purged.

I can't speak to the efficacy of this solution for people with iphones, as I'm not sure where their location data comes from or if there's a way to opt certain routers out of that database. If anyone has any information about this I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Keep in mind that after you update the SSID you will have to re-pair all your devices with the router. That can be a bit annoying but I hope you'll take the time to update yours as we have and maybe by the next rally this won't be an issue for anyone!