Let's learn how to locate your finder using your phone!
For the purposes of this article I’m going to assume that:
- Your Bluetooth and GPS are on, if not please turn them on.
- You are logged into your account
- You have a finder registered to your account
Let’s say I’ve attached the finder to my keys. Well I don’t want to wait until I lose my keys to make sure it works, so let’s double check it right now.
Let’s say, as an example, that I had misplaced my keys somewhere in the office. How would I find them?
Cue the XY finder we set up in the last Lesson. With this bad boy we can find those keys whether they have been lost or hidden.
To do this, I’m going to open up my app. At the bottom of the screen you can see the finders I have on my account.
Tap on the finder you want to find and it will ‘expand’ to cover part of your screen. Now you’ll see front and center are three bars and right now they’re displaying ‘Out of Range’. This means the finder is too far away to ring, so we have to track it down a bit first. It’s like a scavenger hunt. Scavenger hunts are fun, right?
In this case I’m pretty sure it’s still in the building so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. We'll cover how to find your finder if you don't know what area it's in later on, you can click here to jump there.
Those 3 bars we see are our friends for this,as we get closer to the finder they’ll go from “Out of Range” to “Far” to “Near” to “Here”. We’ll just need to search a bit until we get there. The XY finders have a practical range of 75-100ft in most urban settings, more on the range here.
Now that it’s showing “Near” we can try to ring it! There is a button on the app that says “Find It”, just tap that and wait for it to ring. You’ll see that it changes from “Find It” to “Stop”, this lets you know that it’s ringing. If you can’t hear it, it may be buried under something.
Now let’s get out with it right now and talk about our worst nightmare, you press “find it” and it says failed to connect or out of range or it says “stop” but the finder is not actually making noise. If this is happening to you click one of the links in that last sentence or here to go to our troubleshooting page.
We do our best to make our finders as reliable as possible, but sometimes we know there are hiccups. We recommend that whether you’re testing your finders out or searching for real:
- Don’t rapidly press the button. In order to save battery life they’re designed to only function once every 30-45 seconds.
- Give it a few moments, sometimes it doesn’t connect instantly. This applies both to pressing the button and to watching the near, far bars.
Now we're going to go over what happens if you're not sure where you lost your finder. As long as your GPS is enabled your phone can keep track of the last place it saw your finder and put a pin on the map that shows on your app. If you navigate to that pin, you can go through the steps above to track down your finder and the valuables it’s attached to.
There are times where, despite everything we do, something just goes missing. Maybe it’s no longer in the last place your phone saw it, or maybe there was a hiccup with your GPS and it's position didn't update. Well in those cases you can tap “find it” and it will ask you if you would like to mark your finder as lost. If someone with the app running on their phone gets near your lost finder, you’ll get an email saying it’s been found and giving you the new location of it.
Don’t worry about thieves though, the person who ‘finds’ your finder does not get an indication that it’s there.
This concludes the lesson on locating your finder, I hope you enjoyed it.
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If you have any questions about the information above feel free to drop them below in the comments.
If none of those lessons seems to have what you need, feel free to jump over to our Troubleshooting or FAQ section for more info.
If you still have questions, you can go ahead and send a help request straight to our customer service department.