Finding places

Finding what is near you is the heart of Radar, and all of it is free.

Search near a postcode or your location

• Type a postcode, a place name or a what3words address, or allow location access to search from where you are.
• Set the radius by sliding it, from 0.5 up to 60 miles. It is deliberately fine at the low end so you can look just around the corner.
• Results are ranked nearest-first across every data source at once.

On a computer the search box sits in the header. On a phone or a tablet it is the Search tab along the bottom, which opens a panel holding the box and the radius together. See The Search tab.

Searching where you are, and searching where you are looking

Two buttons do two different jobs, and it is worth knowing which is which.

Search where I am takes a single position reading and searches around it, then stops. On a computer it sits in the header next to the search box; on a phone or a tablet it is the round button with the radar symbol, in the stack at the bottom right where your thumb already is. It does not leave your position switched on afterwards, so it costs you nothing in battery.

That is deliberately not the Me button, which keeps showing where you are on the map and follows you as you move. See Showing your location.

Search this area appears when there is ground on screen your results do not cover. It is a pill offering to run the same search where you are now looking, so you can explore ahead along tomorrow's route without retyping anything. It stays out of the way while the map is simply keeping up with you.

On a phone it sits near the bottom of the map, just above the results sheet, because it appears in response to a pan and the hand that just panned is already down there. It moves up and down with the sheet, so it is never buried under it. On a computer it is across the top, and drops to the bottom when the route planning card is in the way.

Zooming out brings it up too, which it did not used to. The pill only watched the middle of the map, so widening the view to look further afield, the natural way to go hunting for more, moved nothing it was measuring and the pill stayed down. It now measures how far the map you can see reaches past the circle that was searched, so panning and zooming both count. Zooming in does not bring it up, because everything on screen is already covered.

Worldwide search is free. Radar is strongest where it holds a full copy of the map, which is now most of western Europe, but it will search anywhere in the world at no cost, and a place name is looked up worldwide rather than in the UK only. See Where in the world. (Route planning is Great Britain only, which is a separate thing; see Routing.)

When a place name means more than one place

Plenty of names belong to several places: there is a Boston in Lincolnshire and one in Massachusetts, and a Newport in Wales, on the Isle of Wight, and in half a dozen other countries. Rather than guess, Radar shows you the matches it found and asks which you meant. Pick one from the list and it searches exactly there.

Postcodes go straight through, since a postcode only ever means one place. The list appears when you press Search or Enter, not while you are typing.

On a phone, and on the screen in a Nomad van, the list sits inside the Search panel directly under the box you typed into, so it is there to tap the moment it appears. It used to float over the panel where a tap could not reach it, and on a tablet the keyboard closing could take it away before you had seen it, so the first search seemed to do nothing and the second showed a list you could not pick from.

Searching by what3words

Radar understands what3words addresses, so you can search for ///filled.count.soap the same way you would search for a postcode. Type it with or without the leading slashes; the capitals and lower case do not matter.

This is worth knowing about for the places a postcode cannot describe. A what3words address names a three metre square anywhere in the world, so it will take you to the exact entrance to a farm track, a particular pitch in a field, or the layby someone told you about, where a postcode would only get you to the middle of the village. It is the format people tend to share when there is no address to give, and mountain rescue and the emergency services ask for it.

Radar shows you the nearest named place ("Bayswater, London") so you can check the square is roughly where you expected before the map moves.

It is free, like the rest of search, and there is no separate what3words account to set up. It works everywhere in the world.

What do you want to do?

Radar now opens by asking. There is a pill above the map naming the job you are on, and tapping it offers seven answers in the words a driver would use:

• Find a parkup for tonight
• Fill up or charge
• Empty and refill the van
• Eat or shop
• Park up for a while
• Find a mechanic
• Leisure time

Pick one and Radar shows the handful of categories that go with it. Empty and refill the van, for example, brings up dump stations, drinking water, toilets, showers and launderettes together, because that is one stop rather than five errands.

This replaces having everything switched on. Radar used to search all 46 categories at once, which sounds generous and is not: a search in a town centre comes back full of cafes and shops, and the dump station a few miles out gets pushed off the end of the list by them. An answer is at most five categories, so the things you actually came for have room.

Your answer is remembered, so Radar opens on the same job next time. A first visit starts on Find a parkup for tonight, which is the job Radar is most often opened for.

The full category list is still there, underneath the question in the Filters panel, and nothing stops you ticking exactly what you want. Picking an answer replaces whatever is ticked; editing the ticks afterwards is fine, and the pill simply stops naming an answer, because the map is no longer showing one.

If you had Radar set up before this arrived, the change resets your categories once to your answer. Set them again in Filters and they stay that way.

Categories

Radar covers 40+ amenity categories, grouped so you can switch whole sets on or off:

• Essentials: toilets, launderettes, post offices, Amazon lockers, ATMs, pharmacies, drinking-water refills.
• Fuel & Charging: petrol and diesel with live prices, LPG / Autogas, EV charging with connector types.
• Food & Drink: supermarkets, restaurants, cafes, pubs, each with its FSA food-hygiene rating, and certified food businesses.
• Health: hospitals, dentists, vets.
• Vehicle Services: MOT stations, mechanics, tyre shops.
• Parking: car parks, Park & Ride, motorhome aires, laybys, with fee, maximum stay, capacity, and vehicle-size limits where the data exists.
• Overnight Parking: motorhome aires, laybys, and private hosts who let travellers stay by arrangement.
• Leisure: campsites, gyms, swimming pools, parks, libraries, designated bathing waters with Environment Agency water quality, and things to go and see: landmarks, museums and galleries, and days out.
• Overland: border crossings, customs and immigration, checkpoints, consulates and embassies, vehicle insurance, shipping and storage, black-water dump stations, showers, oversized-vehicle parking, and ferry terminals.
• Community Reports: road reports, warnings, and spots where overnight stays are no longer allowed.

The last two groups are filled in by travellers rather than by an official feed, so what is there depends on who has been through. See The community map, and add what you find.

Aires and dump stations

Aires now come back everywhere Radar has the map, not just in Scotland. Radar had been asking the open map for aires in a way that never matched anything, so outside the Forestry and Land Scotland Stay the Night car parks the category came back empty, in England and Wales as well as abroad. That is fixed. France, where stopovers are everywhere, was showing none at all.

In France there is now a second source for them. France's national tourism database, which gathers what every regional tourist board publishes, adds around 3,340 aires de camping-car on top of the ones on the open map. They are largely different places, only about one in five was already there, so it roughly doubles what a search for a stopover in France turns up. Most carry the season they are open, a price, and whether there is a service point, and many have a phone number or a website.

The open map does not keep aires and campsites apart, so Radar decides between them on what the site itself says. A caravan site that turns tents away, or advertises somewhere to empty, or says motorhomes are welcome, is treated as an aire. Anything else is a campsite. It is a judgement rather than an official label, so it is worth a glance at the details before you commit to a long drive.

Dump stations now include the ones that belong to a site. Plenty of places to empty are not marked as a facility in their own right, they are recorded as part of a campsite or an aire. Searching for a dump station used to miss all of those, which was most of them. It finds them now, and where a stopover has one, it counts as that stopover rather than putting a second pin on the same spot.

Ferry terminals

Ferry terminals are a category of their own now, under Overland, so you can find the crossing rather than hunting for it among car parks and harbours. They come from the open map and work everywhere, which matters for the island hopping and fjord crossings a road route alone will not show you.

They appear in a country as that country's map copy is next refreshed, which happens monthly, so a search somewhere that has not come round yet may still be thin. See Where in the world.

Things to go and see

Radar has always been good at the practical stops and had nothing for the reason you drove there in the first place. Three new categories sit under Leisure, and picking Leisure time brings up all three:

• Landmarks: castles, forts, manor houses, monuments, city gates, lighthouses, windmills and watermills, and the places the open map marks as worth visiting.
• Museums and Galleries: indoor, usually ticketed, and usually with opening hours worth checking before you set off.
• Days Out: zoos, theme parks and aquariums, the ones that take a whole day and have a car park big enough for a motorhome.

Three categories rather than one on purpose. Radar keeps the nearest 50 of each category, so lumping them together would mean that in a heritage city the castle you came for loses its place to a row of war memorials 200 metres nearer. Split up, each gets its own room. It also separates the indoor, ticketed sort from the outdoor, free sort, which is a real decision on a wet afternoon.

They come from the open map, so what is there depends on what contributors have recorded. A landmark with no name is left out, and a disused lighthouse is still a landmark, which is usually what you want and occasionally not.

They fill in country by country as each map copy is next refreshed, which happens monthly. Until a country comes round, the categories are there and empty rather than missing. See Where in the world.

EV chargers work everywhere now

Open Charge Map has always covered the world, but Radar was still asking it for Great Britain only, left over from when Radar was a British app. A charger search in Oslo or Seville came back empty, and an empty answer from a source that is working looks exactly like a country with no chargers in it. It now asks for wherever you are looking.

Filtering

Everything that narrows a search sits behind the Filters button:

• Answer what do you want to do? at the top of the panel, which sets the categories for you in one tap. See above.
• Turn individual categories on or off, or toggle a whole group. There is a search box, so you can find a category by name rather than scrolling past 40-odd of them.
• Set the radius, and hide parking your vehicle would not fit into.

Your changes run once, when you press Apply. Ticking six categories used to start six separate searches, each taking a few seconds, so the app felt as though it was working against you. Set up everything you want first, then apply it, and Radar searches once.

Radar picks the data sources for you

You will not find a data source filter, and that is deliberate. Radar knows which feeds cover where you are searching and uses the right ones automatically, so a search in France draws on French sources without you having to know which those are. Results from every relevant source are merged, so the same petrol station never appears twice.

The full list of sources, with the licence and attribution for each, is at Data sources and in the app under Data sources. Once results are on screen you can still see which source a particular place came from, in its details and in the results list.

Reading a result

Tap any pin or list row to open its details: full screen on a phone, a panel beside the map on a computer, with any photos at the top. Depending on the place you may see:

• Live fuel prices at petrol, diesel, and LPG stations, in that country's own currency, in Britain, France and Spain. Stations abroad are priced in euro cents and list the grades by the names on the pump, so you see SP95, SP98, E10, and E85 in France, and Gasóleo A, Gasolina 95, Gasolina 98, and GLP in Spain, rather than a British equivalent that would not match the pump you are standing at.
• FSA food-hygiene ratings on food businesses in the UK.
• Certified food businesses in Belgium, which is a different kind of answer: Belgium publishes no graded scores, only which businesses hold a checked hygiene system, so a certified place is a good sign and the absence of one tells you nothing.
• Google ratings where available.
• EV connector types and networks at chargers.
• Parking limits: fee, maximum stay, capacity, and vehicle-size restrictions.
• Photos and tips from other travellers, with the date each was left, and how many recent visitors said they would stop again.
• Opening hours, contact details, and a link to route there or save it.

Places added by travellers also show when they were last confirmed, in the results list as well as on the details. Anything older than a year is flagged in amber. One tap tells everyone else it is still there. See The community map.

Seeing prices in your own money

Fuel prices are shown in the money of the country you are in, because that is the number on the sign at the roadside. If you would rather know roughly what a litre is costing you at home, open Settings, then Units, choose your currency, and tick Convert prices.

Converted prices are marked with a ≈ wherever they appear, on the details, in the results list, and on the map. They use the European Central Bank's daily rate, which is a reference rate rather than the one a card issuer uses, so read a converted price as a rough comparison and not as what you will be charged.

Leaving the tick off keeps every price exactly as the forecourt publishes it, which is the default. Your currency choice is remembered whether the conversion is on or off, so you can switch it on for a trip abroad and off again without setting it up each time.

What is free

Everything on this page is free: search, all categories, all the open data sources, worldwide coverage, and every result detail above. The one source that needs Premium is Google Places, used to fill gaps where open data is thin. See Accounts & Premium.