What is the search radius for Challenges?

[gotta run]

Ok, I don’t care a whole bunch about challenges but for kicks and giggles I clicked the “search for challenges nearby” on the map I get zippo.

Are there really that few of these things in the state, or is the default search radius really small? Challenges don’t show up on the interactive map either.
😕

On the Left Side of the Road...

[hack1of2]

I’ve noticed that challenges as close as 25 miles away don’t show up.

As you probably know there are the local challenges that you’re referring to, and then there are the “worldwide” challenges, which are not location-specific. There are at least 20 worldwide challenges that you can complete pretty much wherever you are.

[Team Deejay]

If you are using the phone app, I believe this uses a 35 mile “radius”, but the way this seems to work is that you get all the challenges in a square bounded by 4 points 35 miles from the location at 45°, 135°, 225°, and 315°. Trigonometry will tell you that this will be only 24.7 miles at the cardinal compass points. (I believe they also neglect the curvature of the earth and measure the distance like we used to do on UTM maps.) Note that the “Get geocaches” function in the API works this same way (and is also limited to a 35 mile “radius”), so if you use the get geocaches functionality in GSAK to get caches you will see similar behavior. I’m sure this was done for programming ease, as it is simpler to define a “square” in longitude and latitude than a circle. It sure is confusing for the users, though.

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