Circular areas to help save lives and find the missing
My name is John May,Chief of Wolfe County Search & Rescue. We would like to see if it's possible to add an option to draw a circular area. This would be extremely useful to SAR teams. We use case studies to determine how far a lost person may travel and a circular area is then drawn showing the most probable areas for the subject to still be within so containment can be initiated. Having the distance of the circular in miles/km along with acres would be awesome. Hopefully this is something that can be incorporated in future revisions. Thanks for a great product and we continually share Gaia with our fellow SAR teams
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I definitely see the benefit. A circular search area is critical for lost person situations. Having that capability would greatly help rescuers stay within those set boundaries which grow larger as time passes. With Gaia searchers can also be updated instantly if the search area changes.
On a separate note I could see potential for it to be used for tracking during hunting. Either estimating the range of a species or blood trailing an injured one.
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I agree with this request. There are a number of applications, especially in a SAR environment, in which this could be useful. Being able to define a search area based on an area of probability that a subject may be located in would be quite helpful. Not only this, but there are non SAR applications as well. For example, say an area has restrictions on how far you must be from roads, trails and streams to camp. Being able to define a circular radius around your proposed campsite would be an easy way to do this.
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I have been asked to comment here, based on my post in the General Discussion...
I hope that my request here is distroed across all platforms. I certainly want to see it on 'Droid and the desktop, not just iOS.
Range rings show a set of concentric circles labeled by distance from a central point, sometimes with radial lines, for judging distance and angle from a geographic location. Keywords: Range rings, radius circles, circles of distance
My DeLorme GPS has these. Garmin doesn't appear to. A quick web search will turn up so many hits that I think the message is clear. Range rings are SO much more useful than scaling lines on a map device. While they are useful on a paper map because you can't draw and erase circles all over your map, there is no excuse for not having them on an electronic device.
Even with paper, during search and rescue (S&R), we will draw them on maps, knowing that the maps will be tossed at the end of the event.
For groundwork, I find the radial lines useful. For cycling and driving, not so much. Toggling either on|off would be useful.
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I will add, that from a recreational standpoint, it would be nice as well. I agree with the distance from camp idea mentioned earlier, and it would be helpful when planning trips. Say I want to plan a trip , but only have a limited amount of time, and want to see what is in a certain drive distance to maximize the adventure, and minimize the amount of time the kids are bored in the car.
Or if you and friends want to plan together, overlapping circles to split the difference allows a smaller search area for what to do.
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Over a decade ago, my first iphone gps app had ranging circles and it was free. They worked perfectly. As a hunter, I could sit in my spot, look at the ranging circles as I zoomed, and say "well, that's an easy 80 yrd shot there, a harder 200 yrd shot there, and a house at 400 yards there, so no shooting in that direction". Also the quickest way to find out how much farther you have to go.
I really liked that feature...
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I'm shocked that this hasn't been implemented yet. I found this post while searching how to do it. For me, I would use it on Gaia to plot my theoretical flight areas for my drone. For instance, I put a 4.3-mile circle around a point of interest and know where I need to be to film it, or I put a 4.3-mile circle on me and know what I can go look at.
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For those who have been waiting more than four years for Gaia to add Range Rings or circles... I'm sure you already discovered this, but sartopo.com and caltopo.com of course both have Range Rings available ... and have for many years.
I loved Gaia for so many years, but their development of some of the base level tools we needed... just never moved forward: so I had to abandon it. I still have Gaia on my phone of course, it is even on my primary home screen, and love a lot about the app and interface, but for actual work... I'm in SARTopo all the time now.
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