Since 2019 it has become apparent that many people have not been properly prepared for Expo.
This is what you need to do:
For the latest updates for the most recent phones, go to: dontkillmyapp.com
Phones assume that you are walking along streets, or running along tracks or cycling. They are very bad at making the right guesses for the Totes Gebirge plateau.
Do not select the "high accuracy" location setting on your phone. Mostly this will snap your position to the nearest cafe or bierstube: by default it will use the nearest WiFi it can find and assume that you are there, and will ignore the perfectly reasonable GPS position it has recorded directly.
This is all explained by Google here.
On the plateau, this "high accuracy" mode will simply give you the wrong position if it can't get an excellent GPS fix (but we only need a "good" one). There is poor cell tower reception too, so trying to use that for location is just as bad.
What you want is GPS and only GPS (more precisely GNSS: which includes GPS, Glosnas, Beidou, Galileo etc.).
If you do not have a good GPS fix, you want to know that, not be given some confabulated guesstimate by whatever some programmer for Apple or Android thought your might want.
If all that config sounds too tricky, or if you have done it but are not confident that it works, just put your phone into Airplane Mode when on the plateau, and re-start your GPS app after you do so.
When you share photos on your phone to the Expo photo sharing site, by default, the location of those photos will be stripped out. So all those lovely pics of intriguing cave entrances you snapped on your walks are now utterly useless.
Also, Google Photos is for TEMPORARY sharing only *. Archival storage must be done by uploading to the website using the "Upload Photos" page on the website.
So, before expo, perhaps while sitting in a traffic jam around Munich or on the train from Bad Ischl, take a moment to photograph your travel companions in an embarassing pose and fix the this:
We have a separate page specifically on recording cave entrances by GPS in the survey handbook.
So that we can spend less time looking for the body in horrible conditions...
[someone write this is a less frightening way, please?]
If recording a track, you do not want your phone to decide to go into "energy-saving mode" (the default if you are not actively interacting with your mapping app, such as OSMand) as it will drop location points and your recorded track wil now gaily bound over impenetrable chasms, rendering it rather useless for finding your way home in thick cloud.
Unless you have already done a couple of days with your phone set into "continuous GPS mode", you have no idea how long your battery will last. So if you haven't already practiced this on a fell in the UK, you need to bring a phone backup battery with you on expo.
You can buy phone battery backups in Austria, but they are a bit epxensive, and hard to find in Bad Aussee (only available in 2024 in the "chemists" opposite the post office and down the hill a bit, which has a range of electronics stuff).
detailed instructions depend on the type of phone and the version of Android - someone fix this ?!
If you have standard battery saving set up, when you start up OSMand and start recording a track, it will do a popup telling you about how to turn off battery saving.
When anyone shares photos on a "Shared Album" in Google Photos, they are only visible so long as the original photographer keeps the photos on their device: there are loads of photos by Harry Kettle from 2023 which are visible only as blank rectangles on the Shared Album because he has cleared out his photo album on his google account. (This really is a "share" not an "upload".)
So unless the photo is utterly trivial and disposable, please also upload the photos using the "Upload Photos" page on the website before you delete them from your device.
We would rather you didn't use Google Photos at all really, but people will willy-nilly, so let's at least use the same Google photos album each year.
Location fixing: How to obtain a fixed point for a cave survey (2020) "Galileo High Accuracy Service (HAS) is due to become partly available in 2022 and fully available in 2024, which will offer RTPPP for free around the world, both via satellite and network connections. And there will be much rejoicing. " This is an excellent article and nearly all of it is still absolutely true, e.g.:
Keep the device very still. If the position shown by GPSTest slowly refines then stops updating within a minute or two, or shows only the last digit changing slowly, then your device cannot be used for averaging. A device with 1 metre accuracy still shows the 6th and 7th decimal place digits of the longitude and latitude updating every second or so (that is a roughly 10 cm wobble every second). Unless your device can actually do 1 cm accuracy, you should be seeing those numbers change! In general, this makes most phones unusable for this purpose"
Unfortunately RTPPP has not actually caught on [2025] and it is still only available for experts and phones supporting L2 and L5 frequencies have been slower to appear than we hoped. Read Wikipedia on Real-time kinematic positioning (RTK).