To get back to the application page, either close this page, press the back button of your mobile device (if using one) or use this link: Close window
Quick & Dirty Geohash Navigator (QDGN) runs simply in a web browser and lets you navigate to a geohash with minimal hassle. Just open the page on a device with GPS tracking and let the page access the GPS location. Your location and the nearest geohash or the globalhash (if available and within 200 kilometres) are shown on a map. When you reach the hashpoint (distance to the hashpoint is less than the GPS uncertainty), the distance and your location turn green, and you can take a screenshot to show as proof in the expedition report.
The nearest geohash is updated when another one becomes nearer than the current one when moving, when the day changes or when new hashpoints become available west of W30°. No input is required from the user.
Some combinations of hardware, operating system and web browser may not work well. On the author’s Android phone, Mozilla Firefox does not get accurate location data, but Google Chrome and Chromium-based Vivaldi work well.
The list of data should be mostly self-explanatory. The distance between the hashpoint and your location is shown following the geohash location. The “nearest geohash” label is a link leading to the geohash page on the Geohashing Wiki. The “geohash location” label is a link to the hashpoint on geohashing.info.
The page automatically tries to disable the device’s screen automatically turning off. If successful, the brightness icon (🔆) is lit.
If you tap or click the lightning icon (⚡), a silent audio file is played in the background, which should prevent the page from unloading if you switch between pages or apps. This is probably not necessary unless you record a tracklog (see the next section). The icon is lit while the audio is playing.
The distance to the hashpoint and the GPS accuracy are shown in metres by default. To toggle between metres, feet and miles, tap or click the ruler (📏) icon.
By default, the map is not panned automatically once it has been drawn. You can tap or click the map-pin icon (📍🗺️) to toggle between auto-centring to your location on every update (icon lit) or the default behaviour (icon greyed out).
Tracklog recording is started by tapping or clicking the record icon (⏺️). It then turns into a pause icon (⏸️), and tapping or clicking it stops the recording. To prevent loss of data by mistake, the page will ask for confirmation before actually stopping recording.
Before a tracklog exists in memory, one can be imported from a GPX file by tapping or clicking the open folder icon (📂).
When a tracklog has been recorded, it can be exported as a GPX file by tapping or clicking the floppy disk icon (💾). Your web browser may give the file any arbitrary name, but the content will still be a valid GPX document.
It is possible to record your progress and save it as a tracklog in GPX format when you are done. However, there are a few caveats to keep in mind, and a dedicated tracker application or a separate tracking device (like a GPS receiver) may well be a better option.
If you intend to use this feature, it is recommended to test it before going out. Make sure it works as intended on your device. Be ready to accept that something can still fail and the tracklog can be lost at any time.
The tracklog is drawn on the map as a red line. Any breaks in continuous recording are shown as dashed lines.
Shown hashpoints will be saved to the GPX as waypoints if you get within a kilometre of them. If there happen to be extra ones or if you want to add your own, you can edit the GPX file in an XML or text editor.
While it is being recorded, the tracklog is backed up in the local storage of the web browser. When the page is reloaded, the backup is retrieved from the local storage if the user accepts it. Recording can then also be resumed immediately. (See the second point in the next subsection for possible issues.)
It is possible to import a tracklog from a file before recording has been started or an old tracklog has been retrieved from the local storage. Importing any standard-compliant GPX file should work, but it is recommended to only use QDGN-generated files.
On a mobile device, your location is likely to update only when the page is visible and active. Thus, you should keep the page open whenever you are recording. If you switch to another app (e.g. the camera app) or turn the screen off, the recording stops and continues when you open the page again.
Also on a mobile device, if you switch away from the page, it may be unloaded. When the page is then reloaded, the recorded tracklog is supposed to be retrieved from local storage, but sometimes this fails for some reason, and then the tracklog is lost. According to the author’s limited experience, this happens often in Chromium-based mobile web browsers, but Firefox seems to be robust. The unloading prevention feature (⚡) is supposed to prevent this and has been working well in testing.
The local storage is limited in size, though the limit is likely at least several megabytes on most systems. If the tracklog has been recorded too long and is too large, backing it up may fail, but this is surely not a problem in most practical cases. The size of the current tracklog in memory is shown after the “tracklog” label.