Mapping is the main workspace. Open it from the top nav after you have selected an incident on the Dashboard — without an active incident there is nowhere for sites, coverages, or saved runs to live. The page is a map with a left sidebar of tools, not a settings form that happens to have a map on it.
The sidebar tabs are Sites, Analysis, Testing, POI, Perimeters, and Results (Saved Data). Analysis is where you run coverage, links, point checks, and radio routes. Testing is field reception. POI and Perimeters keep the common operating picture. Results holds the runs you already made, including saved drives to a pad; fold a group with the button on its left so the list stays short. If you see a Planning tab you were not expecting, ask your system admin — that tool is not covered here.
How a site gets on the map
Sites starts with Add site. You can type coordinates (decimal, degrees-minutes, or the usual mixed formats), look up a city, or click the map. A quick click asks for a name and frequency and drops the pin so you can refine it. While you edit, you can drag the marker onto a ridge; latitude and longitude follow, and ground elevation updates when the point moves. The edit panel stays docked so the map stays usable.
Each site is either Live or Plan. Live means it is in play — linked to an incident kit, or set to Active / none while you wait for a kit. Plan (Planning / none) is a candidate you have not committed. Live pins are blue; plan pins are amber. A favorite star (stored in this browser for this incident) adds a green diamond stroke so the pads you care about tonight are easy to find. Hide / Show takes a pin off the map without deleting the site; hidden cards stay in the list, dimmed. Writers can drag the list to reorder it for everyone on the incident — that same order shows in Analysis and Testing site dropdowns.
The site form is a set of cards: location, kit and channel, then a VHF card and a UHF card, then planning targets. Location includes an optional Access dropdown — Drive, Fly, Hike, or Boat — for how techs reach the pad. You pick hardware — antenna and feedline — and the form fills pattern, gain, and loss. Choose Other / custom only when you really need to type decibels. A 4312-class kit is two installs (command VHF and a UHF link), so the bands are separate masts, power, and coax. Point a yagi with azimuth and downtilt when the path is not omni. Account units (metric or imperial) follow you into heights and distances.
You can start from a personal RF preset under Admin → Presets, then tweak. Linking an incident kit fills empty name, NFES, channel, and frequencies from inventory. The map never lets kit GPS move the pin — if the two disagree, the map wins, and saving the site writes coordinates back to the kit. Shared names and frequencies then stay in step. Delete removes the site and the coverage, links, and routes that belonged to it.
Each card has icon actions — pencil to edit, car for access, waves to load coverage when a saved map exists, eye to hide or show, and trash to delete. Hover a button for its name. Analysis tools do not steal A/B buttons from this list. Open Analysis and pick the transmitter (or Site A and Site B) there, so you can run coverage on one pad while you check a link between two others.
Driving to a site
The car icon on a site card opens Access. The site list hides until you tap Sites to go back. This is travel, not radio coverage, and it is not Admin → Access (that page is people and permissions).
Use this tool to find a drivable route from a start location to the selected site, using OpenStreetMap. Choose a start — your location, a map click, an address, the ICP, another site, or a point POI — then Find routes. It looks up the closest mapped road to the pin (including forest tracks when that is what OSM has), tells you whether the last mile is on the road, a short gap, 4WD, or a hike, and draws the drives the driving map actually knows. If the closest way is a track the driving map will not use, it falls back to a road it can drive. Forest service and ranch roads are often missing. The map jumps to the set of paths, then to one path when you tap it. Save a line so the team can load it from Results or Overlays. Export the chosen drive as GPX or KML for a truck GPS.
Reading the workspace
The small square in the top-left corner switches basemaps (topo by default, plus satellite, streets, and a few others). Each map remembers its own choice. Zoom goes in close; some topos soften when you pass their native tiles instead of going blank. The 3D square under the picker tilts the same view over real ground — how to fly it is under 3D terrain on this page.
Overlays, top right, is the layer stack: each loaded coverage, combined coverage, fire outlines, TFRs, land ownership, live and plan pins, ICP, ops locations, POIs, and testing points. Show, hide, and fade them independently. Land and TFR start collapsed. Click the shade for μV, dBm, S-unit, and field strength at that cell. Turn on Land → Ownership to click a parcel for the owner of record and land status. Turn on TFR to paint live FAA restrictions near this view; click a polygon for the NOTAM. A second click clears the popup.
Map tools sit in the workspace header next to Export. A Names switch keeps a small site-name label above each map pin; hovering expands that label into the tooltip card, and clicking grows it into a site-details card (instead of a separate Leaflet popup). A Links switch beside it draws dashed lines between sites that share a UHF link (Hub & Spoke or Crossband). Each dash and dot has a thin white outline that thickens as you zoom in so hops stay readable on satellite, and thins out when you zoom out so it does not swallow the marks. Where the straight hop goes under a ridge, that stretch turns red on the flat map (same white outline). An Access switch to the right of Links puts a small car, helicopter, hiker, or boat on the bottom-left of each pin that has a tech-access setting (Drive / Fly / Hike / Boat). That is not the car-button routing tool on the site card. Measure is two clicks and a distance, snapping to nearby sites and POIs. Profile draws a live elevation strip as you move the mouse, then locks a detailed ground path when you click the end — the rubber-band label shows distance and magnetic heading from the first click (what a compass reads when you aim a yagi). Line of sight is a handheld/pole test: **10 ft** off the ground at both ends. Useful before you spend a coverage run. Compare splits two saved coverage maps (or the combined map) with a draggable bar so you can see what changed when you raised a mast or switched engines. Selected maps jump to 100% opacity for a clean split. Click-inspect reports only the side you click. Click Compare again to leave — both compared shades hide so they do not sit stacked.
Export on the workspace captures what you are looking at (image or a letter-size PDF). Saved analyses have a fuller export picker on Results — see POI, perimeters, results, and export.
When a site can work both VHF and UHF, each Analysis form shows a transmit-frequency picker. A single-band site hides that control and just uses the band it has. The whole RF chain for the run comes from that band’s card; nothing writes back to the site until you edit the site itself.
3D terrain
The 3D square under the basemap picker tilts this incident’s map over real ground. Right-drag (or Ctrl-drag) to pitch, two-finger or right-drag to spin, and use the zoom buttons as usual. You are still looking at the same place — this is a viewing mode, not a globe.
Whatever basemap you already picked sits on the hills. Site, ICP, POI, ops, and field-test pins sit on the ground; a pin behind a ridge or behind the camera hides so it does not float in the sky. Pins and link hops keep their last good height when they sit behind you, so they do not bounce. Turn Names on and the same site-name chips stay on the pins — hover for the tooltip card, click for site details, same as the flat map. Combined pins (two or more sites on one spot) stack each name on hover the same way they do on the flat map. Turn Access on and the same drive/fly/hike/boat badges stay on the pins. Hover or click a POI, ICP, ops, field-test, or placement pin for its name and details too. Fire outlines, TFRs, POI tracks, route ribbons, access drives, placement areas, and any coverage shade already loaded drape with the terrain. Site-link hops do not — they go straight through the air from pin to pin, the way the radio path does, and stay on that line when you zoom. Plan hops are dots like the flat map; live hops stay dashed. They duck behind a ridge when the hop goes through it. They keep the same zoom-scaled white outline as the flat map. Switch topo or satellite while you are tilted — the shade stays on the new tiles. Solid / Smooth and the dBm key (purple vs clear below threshold) change that draped shade the same way they do on the flat map.
Hover the 3D button for Reset tilt. Hills are true scale. A compass under 3D turns the view north-up without flattening the tilt; the needle follows the heading. Measure, Profile, Compare, click-inspect, placing points, and the workspace Export stay on the flat map — opening 3D leaves those tools, and Export switches you back to 2D first. Mini-maps on Link and Placement stay flat. Tap 3D again to return. If the button will not start the view, stay in 2D; the rest of Mapping still works.
Keep going with Coverage maps, links and point checks, or field testing.