Find Me SOS app for iPhone and iPad

What is FindMe SOS?

FindMe SOS encodes your position with 4 words. These 4 words define your unique location within a 20 metre square. FindMe is valid for the UK, Ireland and the conterminous USA.

All of the words used by FindMe are phonetically distinct - that means they will not cause confusion when spoken by a wide number of people, including non-native English speakers.

This makes FindMe different from other word geocoding apps that have no such safeguards in place.

FindMes words are derived from the NATO phonetic alphabet and PGP-words, and then further refined using a phonetic algorithm. This ensures maximum intelligibility over poor mobile/cell phone voice services.

This is essential for an emergency high-stress situation.

FindMe has a speech synthesizer that allows the receiving caller to hear the 4 words. Long pressing on any label will also allow the words and coordinates to be copied.

REVERSE GEOCODE

The FindMe Decode application will allow you to reverse geocode your 4 words into commonly used map coordinates for each included country. Different words can be easily selected to provide a complete reverse-geocode facility.

Coordinates provided are as follows:

Decimal latitude longitude degrees (DLL)
Military Grid Reference System (MGRS)
British National Grid (BNG)
Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM)

ACCURACY AND RESOLUTION

FindMe provides unique 20m square grid locations, and uses a Lambert conformal conic map projection using the WGS84 standard to ensure accurate visualisation over the areas defined.

Modern cell/mobile phones will typically have a best-case location error of around ±5m - this means that your position is only accurate to within a 10m diameter circle (68% RMS). In poor conditions (e.g. due to non-ideal satellite constellation patterns, weather, obstruction), the error can be much larger.

FindMe therefore only provides a location to 20m, as we consider this as within consumer device capabilities and more than adequate for emergency location services. Unlike other word geocoding apps, we assert that any finer resolution is technically not guaranteed and unnecessary for this purpose.