Cam IncollFieldwalker's Field Walker mode shows your live GPS position on your property's aerial map, lets you drop observation pins at your exact location with one tap, and works entirely offline — because the paddock where you need it most is the one with no mobile signal.
There's something that changes when you can see your design while you're standing on the land. The swale line you drew at your desk is right there beneath your feet. The contour you've been studying on screen is the slope you're walking up. The pin you dropped last month, noting the wet patch, is exactly where the water is sitting now after this week's rain.
Field Walker is the tool that makes that connection.
Your map, your position, in real time
Open Field Walker and the screen becomes a live aerial view of your property. Your GPS position is shown as a dot with an accuracy circle, moving as you move. The map can follow your heading — turn and the map turns with you, so what's ahead of you on the ground is ahead of you on the screen.
Every pin you've already placed on this project is visible as a labelled marker. The design layers are there too — the contour lines, the boundary, the design elements. You're seeing your design overlaid on the real landscape, from where you're standing.
Drop a pin where you stand
One tap on the "Drop pin here" button creates a pin at your current GPS position. The observation panel slides up immediately so you can write a note, take a photo, record what you're noticing. The pin is placed at your actual coordinates, with your actual GPS accuracy shown next to it.
You keep walking. You notice something else. Another tap, another pin, another note. The observations accumulate on the map as you traverse the property, each one precisely located and ready for review later.
If the georeferencing on the map seems off — if your GPS position would place the pin somewhere that doesn't look right — the tool tells you. It refuses the pin rather than saving a wrong location, which is better than silently placing it in the wrong spot and having you trust it later.
Offline by default
This is the feature that matters most on Australian rural properties, and probably on most rural properties anywhere. Mobile signal is patchy at best, absent at worst. The paddock where you're doing your site analysis is almost certainly the one where your phone shows no bars.
Field Walker works offline. You download the map data before heading out — the aerial image, the elevation data, the contours, your existing pins. Everything the tool needs is on your phone.
Pins you drop offline are queued locally. A clear indicator shows "N pins waiting to sync." When you get back in range — or back to the farmhouse wifi — the queued pins upload automatically. The pins that were waiting are now on the server, visible from the desktop editor, part of the permanent project record.
This queue is reliable. We spent time making sure pins can't get lost during rapid drops or a poorly-timed sync. If you're walking a fence line dropping a pin every 50 metres, every one of them survives the journey from field to server.
Two walkers, one map
Field Walker and Contour Walker share the same live map. The aerial view, the GPS tracking, the heading-up rotation, the pin markers — all built once and used by both tools. You can switch between them: walk a contour line with Contour Walker, then switch to Field Walker to drop a pin at the spot where you want to start the swale.
The two tools are different jobs on the same site visit. Contour Walker guides you along an elevation line. Field Walker records what you find as you go. Together, they turn a walk across the property into a design session — observations and contour lines captured in real time, on the real terrain, ready for the design work that follows.
The observe step, made real
Permaculture design begins with observation. But observation that stays in your head, or in a disconnected notebook, loses value fast. The detail fades. The location blurs. The connection between "what I saw" and "where I saw it" gets fuzzy.
Field Walker anchors your observations to the land. Every note has a location. Every photo has a pin. Every pin is on the map that you'll eventually design on. The observations you make in the field flow directly into the design process — no transcription, no re-entering coordinates, no trying to remember where that wet patch was.
The design gets better because the observation was better. And the observation was better because the tool was right there in your hand, on the land, showing you exactly where you are.