You can download Box Radar from the Android Market, or directly from boxradar.com (using your phone).
Box Radar is free! Letterboxers are incredibly generous people and Box Radar is a gift to that community.
To allow Box Radar to "radar" clues from Atlas Quest, you first must "register" your app with Atlas Quest.
Start by using your web browser to set your Atlas Quest App Password in the App Preferences. This allows you to register the app with a password that is not your regular Atlas Quest password. Box Radar does not look at or save your password during the registration process, but it's a good idea to excercise caution when giving security access to applications.
Next, open the registration page (Menu/Register) in the app. You will need to enter your trail name and password.
If the registration was successful, Box Radar will now automatically show you nearby boxes on the radar display.
Box Radar currently requires your LbNA log in information in order to download LbNA clues. To set this information, enter the Settings page (Menu/More/Settings) and enter your LbNA Email and LbNA Password. Then use the Test Account option to make sure that these values were entered correctly.
Once your account details are set, Box Radar will start to show nearby LbNA clues on the radar display.
Do not give Box Radar your LbNA password if you do not trust it not to do anything malicious with your account. Box Radar only uses the pasword to log in to the web site and run the members' version of the clue search, but it's OK to be cautious.
Support for Box Radar is community driven. If you have a question on how to use Box Radar, or are having difficulties, please join the Box Radar Group on Atlas Quest. The people who read this board are incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. The questions on this page have been selected from questions posted to the group board. It is recommended that you make this board one of your "favorites".
Feature requests should be made to the Box Radar Group on Atlas Quest. Please remember that feature requests are requests, and that not all requests will be honored.
The major use of Box Radar is to see clues for nearby boxes. Feature requests that stray too far from this main usage are unlikely to be implemented.
Great question, thanks for asking! There are many ways to support Box Radar, including (but not limited to):
Unlike in Geocaching, there is no requirement in Letterboxing to release the exact location of a box when posting clues. It is up to the planter to determine how much or how little location information to give. Some boxes only have country or state information given, while some list the exact address. Many boxes only give the location of the nearest town.
Box Radar uses the location of the box as reported by LbNA or Atlas Quest. Due to varying precision of the location, as entered by the planter, the location of the box on the map may vary greatly from the actual location of the box.
Always double-check the location in the clue before attempting a find!
The precision of the location information varies wildly between boxes (see Question 3.1); however, boxers often research clues before heading onto the trail. Box Radar supports several methods for refining the box location. Listed in order of ease-of-use, they are:
Atlas Quest Custom Locations
Box Radar supports Atlas Quest custom locations (a Premium member feature). When viewing a clue on Atlas Quest, you can enter a more precise location for a box by clicking on the pencil icon near the Custom Location field.
Set Address feature
When viewing a clue in Box Radar, you can set a custom location using Menu/Set Address. This will set the location of the box using the geolocation feature of your phone.
Box Radar Address Tags
Box Radar supports address "tags" that can appear anywhere inside the clue or your Atlas Quest notes for a box. Tags take the form: *br*ll=latitude,longitude* (one line, no spaces). Replace "latitude" and "longitude" with the actual values (for example: *br*ll=43.610584,-70.216313*).
Some of the advanced Box Radar features require your Atlas Quest account password. They include:
To enter your password, enter the Settings screen (Menu/More/Settings) and click on Atlas Quest Password. Use the Test Account feature to make sure that it was entered correctly. This password needs to be your account password and not your app password.
Do not give Box Radar your Atlas Quest password if you do not trust it not to do anything malicious with your account.
Box Radar will search for clues using both Atlas Quest and LbNA, so it's possible for some boxes to appear twice if they are listed on both sites. Box Radar can automatically detect cross-listings (the LbNA listing links to the Atlas Quest clue, or vica-versa); however, if there are two independent listings, they will both show up on the radar screen.
The "fix" is to ignore one of the listings (Menu/Ignore Box while viewing the clue).
When Box Radar searches for clues, it only requests clues for boxes that you have not already found. This is to reduce download sizes, speed up processing the clues, and to avoid search result size limits.
This means that when you log a find online, Box Radar may not find out about it right away, and it may stay on your radar display. If this bugs you, there are couple of work-arounds:
There are quite a few reasons why a box may not show up on your Box Radar map.