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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.