The map

The Map page (sidebar → Map) shows where you are, the FAA airspace around you, and what the ground is doing between your launch point and where you plan to fly. It is a planning aid. Tobren is not a LAANC provider: request authorization through your LAANC provider, as you do today. Choose your provider once in Settings → LAANC provider and the point panel links straight to it (“Request LAANC authorization with …”, opens in a new tab), so you do not have to open another app first.

Show where you are

Click Show my location. Your browser asks for permission the first time; Tobren never asks on its own when the page opens. The map centres on you and says how precise the fix is (“to within about ±N m”). A laptop on Wi-Fi can be off by hundreds of metres, and the page warns you when the fix is looser than 100 m.

If the browser refuses, has no location, or times out, the page says which, and the rest of the map still works.

Airspace and LAANC ceilings

Zoom in to a town or an airport and turn on either layer:

• Airspace (Class B/C/D/E) — the FAA’s controlled-airspace shapes that can reach down to where a drone flies, including shelves whose floor is set above sea level (such as Denver’s Class B). Class D is drawn dashed.
• LAANC ceilings (UAS facility map) — the FAA grid of the highest altitude LAANC can authorize automatically in each cell, coloured by band and labelled when you zoom in. A 0 ft cell means LAANC cannot authorize there automatically.

The Map key explains the colours. Airspace loads from zoom 9 up; on a wide screen at that zoom it covers only the middle of the map, and the page tells you to zoom in to cover the edges. If the FAA cannot be reached, or returns more shapes than one request carries, the page says so instead of showing an empty map. If the FAA sends shapes Tobren can’t read, the page warns that some areas may be missing: a blank area then does not mean the airspace is clear. The FAA publishes airspace for the United States only; elsewhere the map says no airspace is shown.

What’s at a point

Tap or click anywhere (or use Look up the map centre from the keyboard). The panel shows:

• Airspace class at or below 400 ft. “Class G — uncontrolled” appears only when the FAA data was read and no controlled airspace applies there.
• LAANC — the facility-map ceiling at that point, or that no grid cell covers it.
• Ground elevation in feet above sea level, from the U.S. Geological Survey’s 3DEP terrain data.

Each part is checked separately. If one could not be checked, it says so, with Try again, and never reads as “nothing here”.

At the bottom of the panel is the link to your LAANC provider. If you have not chosen one, it says Choose your LAANC provider in Settings and links the FAA’s list of providers. The same link appears in a flight’s Airspace authorization section, where you record what you filed. Tobren only links: it does not file or check an authorization.

Height above the ground

Set a launch point (from the panel, or Use my location as launch point), then tap where you plan to fly. With a flying height above take-off (400 ft unless you change it), the panel estimates how high above the ground the aircraft would be at that point: for example, ground 60 ft lower than the launch point puts a 400 ft climb about 460 ft above the ground there. If the ground is higher than your flying height allows, it says the aircraft would be below the terrain.

This is an estimate from terrain data, not a measurement. It ignores buildings and trees, and it is only as good as your launch point.

Flights imported from DJI

A flight imported from a DJI flight record also keeps a simplified GPS track, whether the import made a new draft or matched a scheduled flight. An import that matched a scheduled flight before matched imports began keeping tracks has none: those were not backfilled, so the flight log says no track is stored. If you later unlink or swap the match in the review queue, the track moves with the flight record it came from. A new draft also gets, where the terrain data covers it, an estimated maximum height above the ground. Open the flight log to see the track drawn on a map, from take-off to landing, marked “Simplified GPS track from the DJI flight record”, with the estimate beside the other height figures. Manual, CSV and AirData logs have no track. See Flight logs and Imports & migration.

Setting a location from the map

In a flight log’s location, and when scheduling or editing a flight, Pick on map opens a map. Tap a spot to set its latitude and longitude (rounded to six decimal places). With a keyboard, move the map until the crosshair is on the spot and choose Use map centre.

What leaves Tobren

When a map loads, your browser fetches map images directly from OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap data). OpenFreeMap receives your browser’s IP address and, as any web request does, its user agent and the site you came from. Tobren does not proxy map images. Airspace (FAA) and ground-elevation (U.S. Geological Survey) lookups for the spot you tap or the area you are viewing go through Tobren’s servers, with coordinates rounded to about 11 metres. When a DJI flight record is imported, Tobren sends the U.S. Geological Survey the take-off point and up to 12 points along the flight track, rounded the same way, to estimate height above the ground. No name, email address or account details are sent to any of them. See Privacy and your data.