Summary

Nodes with uninitialized or stale GPS frequently appear at or near 0°N, 0°E ("Null Island") on the map. This point has no real-world significance for mesh deployments — it's in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean — and clutters the map with false positions.

Proposed behavior

Filter out position updates where both latitude and longitude are within a small radius of 0,0 (e.g. |lat| < 0.001 && |lon| < 0.001) before storing or rendering them on the map.

Why a radius rather than exact equality

Some firmware rounding or floating-point serialization can produce values like 0.000001 rather than exactly 0.0, so an exact equality check would miss those cases.

Root cause

GPS modules output 0,0 as their default before acquiring a fix. Meshtastic firmware skips broadcasting position when both values are exactly 0, but stale 0,0 positions cached before a reboot can still be transmitted and stored.

Impact

• False node markers appear in the ocean on the main map and unified map
• No legitimate mesh node infrastructure exists at 0,0, so filtering it introduces no meaningful false positives

Authored by NodeZero 0️⃣