Balto/Speed Monitor

Speed Monitor

The Speed Monitor measures your walking or movement speed using GPS, displaying real-time speed, average speed, distance traveled, and elapsed time. Periodic speech announcements let you keep track of your pace without looking at the screen, even when the phone is in your pocket.

This feature is useful for determining how quickly you can move through different terrain types, which helps in planning grid spacing for area searches and estimating coverage time.

Opening the Speed Monitor

1. Tap the Options menu in the toolbar
2. Select Speed Monitor
3. The Speed Monitor screen will appear

The Speed Monitor screen

Display

The Speed Monitor screen displays four metrics:

Current Speed

Your current speed, smoothed to reduce GPS noise. Displays 0.0 when you are stationary.

Average Speed

Your average speed since starting the monitor, computed over the total elapsed time including any stopped time.

Distance

The total distance you have traveled since starting the monitor, accumulated only when moving.

Elapsed

The total elapsed time since starting the monitor, formatted as hours:minutes:seconds.

Starting and Stopping

Start

Tap the Start button to begin measuring. The button changes to Stop while the monitor is running.

Stop

Tap the Stop button to pause measuring. All metrics retain their current values. Tapping Start again will resume from where you stopped.

Reset

Tap the Reset button to clear all metrics and start fresh.

Configuring Units

The Speed Monitor supports three unit systems:

mph

Miles per hour with distance in miles

km/h

Kilometers per hour with distance in kilometers

kts

Knots with distance in nautical miles

Select your preferred units from the Units combo box at the bottom of the screen. The display updates immediately.

Speech Announcements

The Speed Monitor can periodically announce your current speed using your device's text-to-speech engine. This lets you keep your phone in your pocket while working.

Set the announcement interval using the "Announce every" combo box:

• 1 min
• 5 min
• 10 min

The announcement says "Current speed: [value] [units]" — for example "Current speed: 2.5 miles per hour".

Background Operation

The Speed Monitor continues to measure speed and make announcements when:

• The phone is locked
• Balto is in the background
• You are using another app

To ensure background operation works, grant Balto the "Always" location permission when prompted.

Tips

• Walk for at least 30 seconds before reading the speed value to allow the internal filter to stabilize
• GPS accuracy varies with terrain — heavy tree cover or urban canyons may reduce accuracy
• Distance accumulation requires GPS accuracy better than 15 metres to filter out noise
• The Speed Monitor uses battery when in the background since it relies on the same GPS updates used by other Balto features