The crew splits at the truck. This is how you account for each other after that.

How a survey crew actually gets separated

A field crew is not a group of lone workers who happen to share a truck, and it is not a team that stays together. It is a team that separates on purpose, several times a day, for reasons nobody would change.

• The instrument stays on a control point and the rod goes out. Within ten minutes that is two people three hundred metres apart with a treeline between them.
• Boundary retracement puts one person in a fence row chasing an iron pipe while the other holds the gun. Whoever is in the brush is the one nobody can see.
• Environmental and geotechnical work is a grid: monitoring wells, borings, sample points scattered across a site. A two-person crew halves the day by splitting the grid, which is the whole reason there are two of them.
• Timber cruising and plot work is walking out to a plot alone and walking back, all day, on a compass bearing.
• The work area moves. The parcel is finished by eleven and the crew drives to the next one, so the location written on the board at the tailgate meeting is wrong by lunch.
• The last person off site is usually alone: the truck is loaded, and somebody walks the traverse back to close it while everybody else waits at the gate.

What goes wrong with the system you have now

Most crews already run an informal accounting system. The problem is not that people are careless with it. The problem is that every version of it fails in the same direction.

• "Text me when you're clear" depends on signal at the exact minute somebody remembers. A missing text raises nothing, because nobody notices a message that never arrived — people notice a phone ringing, not silence.
• The office's picture of where the crew is comes from a board written at seven in the morning, in job numbers and parcel names. Job numbers are not coordinates.
• Address-based dispatch does not describe field work. The crew is nine hundred metres down a two-track behind a locked gate, and the nearest address belongs to a farmhouse two concessions over.
• Radios are line of sight, and the flat battery is discovered at the moment it matters.
• When something does happen, the first question is always "where was he last?" — and the honest answer today is usually the name of the parcel.

What STALKR gives a party chief

Each item below is a capability in the current iOS beta, described as it actually behaves rather than as a headline.

• A Crew per party or per office. People join by entering a Crew code and asking; an owner or admin approves the request, so nobody is added to a crew's map silently.
• Live Crew sharing puts each member's current position, facing direction, accuracy, status and battery on the shared map while they are sharing.
• Presence is labelled live, stale, or unknown. An old fix is drawn as stale rather than presented as current, which is the difference between a map you can act on and a map that lies to you.
• Crew member trails draw the line behind a member from the positions they already published. How far back a trail reaches is set by the plan, not chosen by the viewer.
• A check-in timer or a repeating dead-man switch for whoever is working a line alone. Miss the acknowledgement and STALKR escalates by push notification and email to the Crew and the recipients selected, with the last known location attached.
• Zones — circles or polygons — around a parcel, a work area or a hazard, with Enter and Leave transitions. Polygon Zones and Zone alerts are Pro capabilities in the current plan matrix.
• Markers for the things a site plan does not have: the gate that is locked, the culvert crossing that takes a truck, control, a monitoring well, an unmarked utility. Photos attach to a Marker, so "the pipe is under the fence line" becomes a picture with a coordinate.
• The measure tool returns straight-line distance and bearing between two map points without saving anything. It is a ruler, not a planned route.
• Tracks record where somebody actually walked, with duration, distance and movement statistics. A completed Track can be deliberately saved as a Route and reused on the next visit to that site.
• SOS is a press-and-hold action that creates a panic incident and attempts to alert the active Crew. It is scoped to that Crew, and it does not contact public emergency services.

An honest stale marker is worth more than a confident wrong one

Field crews work in the places where location apps degrade: river valleys, pits, deep timber, the bottom of a right-of-way. What matters is not whether an app keeps working there — none of them do — but what it shows you when it stops.

STALKR ages a position to stale and then to unknown, and it reports the time of the last update on the member card. A direction cone is drawn only when the heading is trustworthy and omitted when it is not. Dark stops new positions reaching the Crew entirely, and viewers keep the last position they were already given, marked offline rather than deleted.

That matters because a search starts from a last known position and a time. "Stale, 14:20, at the north end of the parcel" is a place to begin. A confident dot showing where somebody was two hours ago is worse than no dot at all, and a gap in a trail is a gap in what was shared — not evidence that nobody moved.

Why a crew will actually leave it switched on

Field staff have good reason to be suspicious of a location app that management installs, and a safety tool nobody turns on is not a safety tool. STALKR is built so the honest answer to "who can see me right now" is short and checkable.

• Sharing is scoped to a Crew. What is shared with the work Crew is not shared with any other Crew, and switching the active Crew switches the whole map with it.
• Live and Dark are chosen per Crew, not once for the account. Off shift, a member goes Dark in the work Crew and nothing new is published to it.
• Approximate location can represent a position as an area rather than a point. It reduces precision — it is not anonymity, and authorised viewers still receive an area.
• Publishing a location takes a deliberate consent step first. Nothing starts sharing because an app was installed.
• Tracking Enforced does exist: it is a Pro Crew rule an owner can turn on that keeps every member of that Crew — the owner included — Live until the owner turns it off. If you use it, say so out loud at the tailgate meeting. It also cannot manufacture a position: if location permission is denied there is nothing to publish, and anyone can still leave the Crew.

What it does not do for a survey firm

If you are comparing this against a lone-worker safety product, these are the gaps, stated plainly. Several of them are things a buyer in this industry reasonably assumes are present.

• There is no supervisor dashboard and no web console. The party chief and the office look at an iPhone. The one thing that opens in a browser is a Journey watch link, which is a single trip shared with the watchers chosen for it.
• There are no recurring scheduled check-ins. A timer is armed by hand, by the person it covers, each time — nothing rolls out a check-in schedule across a crew.
• There are no configurable escalation policies or tiers. Escalation goes to the Crew and the recipients that person selected, by push notification and email. It never sends an SMS, and it never contacts emergency services.
• There is no compliance export and no reporting. Nothing here produces a record for a safety file, an insurer or an auditor.
• There is no monitoring centre. Nobody is watching a screen on your behalf at two in the morning; the people alerted are your own crew and contacts.
• There is no man-down or fall detection. A fall into an excavation, a rollover on a two-track, or a strike raises nothing on its own. Somebody has to press SOS, or miss a check-in.
• There is no enterprise provisioning, no SSO and no workforce administration. Each person creates their own account and joins by code.
• It is an iOS TestFlight beta. There is no public App Store release and no Android release, so a crew on Android handsets cannot run it today.
• Background location is implemented and OS-controlled, and physical-device validation is still an open release gate. Force-quitting the app stops ordinary background work, and background execution on iOS is never guaranteed.
• Sharing a position needs a data connection. There are no downloadable offline maps, no offline-first sync and no satellite link, so on a site with no coverage positions age to stale and nothing escalates until service returns.
• Arrival and overdue alerts depend on scheduled server functions and push delivery, so they are neither instant nor guaranteed. STALKR carries no regulatory certification and makes no compliance guarantee.

One day, four moments it changes

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