Navigation and tracking

Radar is the part of Sensa that deals with where your van is, what is around it, and where it has been. It powers the map and the nearby-places search on the Cab and Mobile dashboards and, when you choose to, keeps a record of your journeys that you can look back on in the mySensa app.

Everything you set once lives in one place, the Vehicle tab under Settings. Everything you change while you are on the road sits in the buttons around the map itself.

note

The Settings tab that holds all of this used to be called Radar. It is now called Vehicle, because it answers questions about your van as well as about the map: how tall it is, which fuel it takes, and where its position comes from. Nothing was dropped in the move.

The Vehicle tab

Two cards, and they answer two different questions.

• The first card is how your system navigates. Where its position comes from, whether journeys are recorded, and whether distances read in miles or kilometres.
• The second card is what your vehicle is. Which fuel it takes, and how big and heavy it is.

Where your van thinks it is

Your system needs to know where it is for the map, the nearby-places search, journey tracking and the Schengen day counter. All four use the same answer, so they can never disagree with each other.

GPS source on the Settings, Vehicle tab is where you choose it:

• Auto is the default. Your vehicle's own GPS is used when it has a fix, and the freshest phone location when it does not. Plenty of vans have no GPS of their own, and everybody has a phone, so Auto keeps working either way.
• Vehicle GPS pins it to the tracker fitted to the van, whatever any phone is doing. If you have a GPS router or a telematics box, this is the steadier choice.
• Or name a device. Any device that reports a real position can be picked: a phone running the Home Assistant companion app, or a tracker such as Traccar, OwnTracks, GPSLogger, iCloud, or a telematics box fitted to the vehicle.

Things that only know whether you are home or away, such as a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth presence sensor, are not offered. They have no position to navigate by, so choosing one would be a dead end.

Auto ignores a position that cannot be true

On Auto, a phone that has just reported is not automatically believed. If getting from your last known position to that one would need an impossible speed, Sensa leaves it alone: a partner's phone sitting at home is not where the van is, however recently it checked in.

This looks after itself. The longer it has been since a good fix, the more movement is allowed, so a van that has been trailered across the country is accepted again on its own with nothing for you to reset. It never second-guesses a device you named yourself, and it never second-guesses the vehicle's own tracker, which is bolted to the van: if that says you are at home, you are at home.

One setting, everywhere

The GPS source on the Settings, Vehicle tab is the only place this is decided, and every screen follows it.

The per-screen picker has gone

The Cab Navigation tab used to carry its own Location device dropdown, changing that screen alone. It has been removed. The same two questions were being asked twice on the same dashboard in two different ways, which made it easy to end up with two screens disagreeing about where the van was and no obvious reason why.

Who is driving

Your Sensa system is shared by everyone on your account, and each person can have their own Radar account with their own saved places.

Alongside the map on the Cab Home screen, the Cab Navigation tab and the Mobile Navigation screen is a set of faces, one button per person, showing their photo. Tap one to say who is driving.

Your van then searches Radar as that person. What the map turns up follows them, including the places they have saved, and so does whether you get Premium.

Buttons rather than a dropdown, because this gets used while driving: a photo is recognisable at a glance and is a thumb-sized target.

The people who appear here are the ones on the People tab under Settings.

Picking a driver no longer moves your GPS

Tapping a face used to repoint the whole system at that person's phone. It no longer does. That was right in a van with no GPS of its own, and a step backwards in a van with one, and you had no way to opt out of it.

The two are now separate: the faces say who is driving, and the GPS source setting says where the position comes from. If you would like the two joined up, name that person's phone as the GPS source yourself.

Picking a driver does not change who a recorded journey belongs to. That is always your account, whoever happens to be at the wheel.

The map marker follows whatever your GPS source resolved to. When that is the vehicle itself you get the van; when it is a particular person's phone, you get their photo.

Light and dark on the map

A bright white map at night is genuinely unpleasant to drive beside, so the map carries its own light and dark button, sitting at the start of the row of map buttons.

Leave it alone and the map follows the sun: light through the day, dark after sunset, changing on its own as you drive into the evening. Press it and you have chosen, and it stays where you put it for that screen until you change it again.

• The choice is per screen, like the category buttons. Your cab tablet and your phone each keep their own, and a shared cab screen never hands the next driver the last one's preference.
• It sets the map, not the rest of Sensa. The Sensa themes are dark throughout by design. The map is the one surface with a genuine light version, and the one bright enough at night to matter.
• It needs the Sensa Radar map. The button is hidden on Google Maps and the plain Home Assistant map, which have no appearance for Sensa to set.

Finding things while you drive

Beside the map is a short set of category buttons: Fuel and Toilets. Press one and every match across the part of the map you can see appears as a pin, and keeps appearing as you drive along. Press it again to clear them.

Where they sit depends on the screen. On the Cab Home layout and the Mobile Navigation screen they run along the bottom, under the map. On the Cab Navigation tab, where the map fills the whole screen, they stand in a column down the right-hand side with the map picker at its foot.

Radar's own search answers the question "where am I heading" while you are parked. These answer the one you have at the wheel, which is "what is coming up".

Fuel pins carry a price, and it is the price of your fuel. A filling station publishes several at once, so Sensa uses the fuel type you set on the Vehicle tab to pick the right one. Without it a diesel van would be shown the petrol price at every station.

A few things worth knowing:

• The list is short on purpose. Every entry has to be worth one tap while driving, so we would rather have two good pills than forty you have to read through.
• The choice is per screen. Your cab tablet and your phone each remember their own.
• They need the Sensa Radar map. The pills are hidden when the map is set to Google Maps or the plain Home Assistant map, because those cannot draw the pins.

The map while you are driving

Choose the Drive scene and the map changes with it. It is the one screen in Sensa that knows the difference between sitting in the van and moving in it. You do not have to choose it yourself: the van picks Drive when you set off and hands back to Parked when you stop.

• Everything you tap gets bigger. The map buttons, the category buttons and the layers list all grow to a size you can hit without looking twice.
• Fuel prices are set a size larger, so a price is readable from the driving seat rather than only from the passenger's.
• The search box goes. Nothing on the map asks you to type while you are moving. It is back the moment you leave Drive.
• The layers list becomes tiles rather than a column of thin rows, so choosing what the map shows is one tap on a proper target.

Choose Park, or any other scene, and the full map comes back.

Being in the van is not the same as driving it, so this only happens when you have chosen Drive yourself. A cab screen on the driveway keeps the whole interface, and if your system cannot tell which scene is running it leaves the map alone rather than guessing you are at the wheel and taking the search box away.

Your vehicle profile

The Vehicle card on the Settings, Vehicle tab is where you tell Sensa what you are driving:

Setting	What it is for
Fuel type	Which price is shown on a fuel pin. Diesel, petrol, super unleaded or LPG
Height, width, length	Low bridges, width limits and whether a car park will take you
Weight	Weight-limited roads and bridges
Steepest hill	Routes that would take you up a gradient you would rather avoid

Type the figures in rather than hunting for them on a slider: you know your van is 3.15 m, so enter 3.15.

Leave anything at 0 if you would rather not say. Zero means "not set", and the map simply does not check that one. It does not mean your van is zero metres tall.

Vehicle-aware routing and the warnings that go with it need Radar Premium. Without it your figures are still saved, they are just not used.

Tracking your journeys

Tracking records where your van has been, so you can look back over a trip later, share your location with family, or keep a journal of where you have travelled. You turn it on with the Tracking switch on the Settings, Vehicle tab.

This section covers the van's half: what it records and when. For what you can then do with it, see Tracking, which covers looking at your journeys, exporting them, deleting them and sharing where the van is now, and FollowMe, which publishes a trip to the people you choose as you make it.

Tracking is off until you switch it on, and that choice matters:

• Off means off. While Tracking is off, your van records nothing about where it is and sends nothing out. There is no journey to see and nothing leaves the vehicle.
• Turning it on is your say-so. Switching Tracking on is you agreeing to record the journey. From then on your van notes where it has been and sends that record to Radar, which stores it for you to see later in the mySensa app.

Everyone travelling in the van is recorded while Tracking is on, not only the person who turned it on, so it is worth saying so to whoever is aboard. The Tracking switch always shows whether it is running, and turning it off stops the recording there and then.

Position comes from your GPS source, the same answer the map and the nearby search use, so a van with no GPS of its own can still record a journey from a phone.

What gets recorded, and how often

Your van checks where it is every minute, but it only keeps a position once you have moved about 100 metres from the last one it kept. A journey is drawn from those positions, so a long drive is recorded closely and a short shuffle around a car park is not.

A parked van records almost nothing. While you are stopped, it keeps one position every 30 minutes and no more. That is enough to show where a journey ended, without recording a week on the same driveway.

Two things follow from this that are worth knowing:

• A change does not always show up straight away. If you switch GPS source while parked, the new source usually reports much the same place, so there is nothing new to keep and you may see no change for up to half an hour.
• Positions are sent in batches, roughly every 5 minutes, rather than one at a time.

If you lose signal

Your van records the journey whether or not it has a connection. Positions are written to the van first and sent to Radar afterwards, so a weekend out of coverage is not a lost journey. This is not a degraded mode: what gets recorded in a dead zone is exactly what gets recorded anywhere else.

The van holds roughly three days of driving. If you are out of signal longer than that, it drops the oldest positions first to make room for the newest, because losing the start of a journey is better than losing where you are now.

When the connection comes back, the van sends what it is holding without being asked, oldest first, a batch at a time and about a minute apart. Even a completely full buffer is clear in roughly ten minutes, rather than trickling out over the following hours. Positions are only cleared from the van once Radar has confirmed it has them, so a power cut halfway through sending costs nothing and a batch that arrives twice is stored once.

A journey recorded offline appears in the mySensa app once the van has uploaded it, not before. See Working offline for the rest of what does and does not need a connection.

While you are sharing your location

Sharing your location turns the detail up for as long as the link is live: your van keeps a position every 50 metres rather than 100, checks every 5 minutes while parked rather than 30, and sends what it has every minute. Someone looking for you sees where you are now rather than where you were a while ago.

It settles back to the everyday figures once the last share ends.

How long your journeys are kept

Journeys are kept for 24 months and then deleted automatically. You can see and delete your journeys yourself at any time in the mySensa app, and you can also export them if you want your own copy.

We do not keep them indefinitely by default. A long record of where a vehicle has been says a great deal about the people in it, so it expires unless you ask us to keep it for longer.

Radar Premium

Radar comes in a free tier and Premium. On the van, Premium is what turns your vehicle profile into vehicle-aware routing, low-bridge and weight-limit warnings, and whether a car park will take you.

Premium belongs to a person, not to the van. Your licence comes with a number of Premium places, and the owner of your account decides who holds them in mySensa. So Premium follows the driver you have picked: swap to somebody else and you get theirs.

Someone has Premium if they have taken out Radar Premium themselves, or if they hold one of your account's places while your support plan is live.

You can see which you are getting from the Sensa Radar button among the map buttons. It is tinted gold when the driver you have picked has Premium, and plain when they do not. If Sensa cannot tell yet, for example in the moments after a restart, it is left plain rather than shown as something misleading.

If the driver you pick has no Premium place, Sensa writes a single line into the Log saying so and what to do about it, either because every place on your licence is in use or because one that was theirs has been moved to somebody else. There is no alarm and no notification: this is not a fault, it is a decision for whoever owns the account, and it is the only Radar limitation you can sort out yourself.

The van works exactly the same either way. On the free tier you keep the map, the nearby search and the category pills, and only the Premium extras are held back.

Distance units

Choose whether distances read in miles or kilometres on the Settings, Vehicle tab. This one setting covers everywhere Sensa shows you a distance, including the nearby-places list and the odometer on the Cab dashboard's Engine tab, so your whole system reads the way you prefer.