Table of Contents
Pro Live Map
A public page showing where you are right now. You share one link; your viewers open it and watch. No account for them, nothing to install, and it keeps working when they refresh.
Set it up in your account See a live example
Included with StreamHelpers Pro. The same subscription that covers Pro Chat covers the map too. Only publishing needs the subscription. Viewers do not need an account, and they do not install anything.
Your own address
Every map lives at an address you choose, and no two streamers can have the same one — the first person to claim a name keeps it. Pick yours on the settings page and the link becomes:
https://streamhelpers.com/m/your-name
Letters, numbers and hyphens, 3 to 32 characters, with a letter or number at both ends. Choose something short enough to say out loud on stream, because that is mostly how people will get it. You can change it later, though anyone who bookmarked the old one will need the new link.
Prefer different wording? The same map also answers on /map/, /gps/, /live-map/ and /live-gps/ — so streamhelpers.com/live-map/your-name works just as well, and reads better in a title card. Pick the one you want to be shown under Link wording on the settings page. They are five ways of writing one address, not five maps: every one of them keeps working whichever you choose, so changing your mind later never breaks a link you have already handed out.
The demo map is just one of these. streamhelpers.com/m/demo is our test router publishing to the address demo. Yours sits alongside it on your own name — it is not shared, and nobody else can publish to it.
Setting it up
1. Claim your address
Sign in at streamhelpers.com/pro, open your account, and next to your paired router press Live map. Type the address you want, tick Publish this router to the live map, and press Save map settings. Do this first — the router refuses to publish until an address exists, because there would be nowhere to put the position.
2. Turn it on in the router
On the router dashboard open the GPS tab, then Share my location, and tick Publish to my StreamHelpers Pro live map. The switch saves itself. The router starts sending its position every ten seconds. Within half a minute your link is live.
What it sends: latitude/longitude, speed, heading, altitude, satellites and estimated accuracy. The hosted map also maintains the location trail. This does not send the Companion's separate motion or environmental sensors: g-force, airtime, spin, steps, temperature, pressure and humidity are not included. Display switches remove optional readouts from the public snapshot, and the privacy zone still applies.
Account sign-in is separate from router pairing. An existing signed-in browser session is reused. Pro status proves the router's entitlement, not that everyone using its dashboard owns the subscriber's account, so a new browser still needs email-link or recovery-key sign-in. The remembered email only prefills the sign-in form; it is not an authentication token.
Optional email-and-password sign-in also works once you have set a password after signing in. It avoids waiting for an email link without granting temporary dashboard access or using card details as proof of ownership.
3. Share the link
Put it in your stream title, a panel, a chat command, or your bio. It is an ordinary web page — it works on phones, and viewers can leave it open in a tab all stream.
Only share while live, if you prefer. The GPS tab has a separate switch, Only share while I'm live-streaming. With it on, the router publishes nothing unless it can see that you are actually streaming, so the map goes quiet the moment you stop rather than following you home.
Choosing what viewers see
Everything on the map is yours to switch on or off, on the same settings page:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Map style | Satellite, Streets or Dark. |
| Title | The heading shown on the map. Leave it empty and the map simply carries no heading — you will not be given a generic one. |
| Units | mph and feet, or km/h and metres. |
| Zoom | How close the map sits when it opens, from city-wide to street level. |
| Speed, Heading, Altitude, Satellites | Each readout individually. Switch off the ones you would rather not broadcast. |
| Weather radar | Live rainfall painted over the map. United States coverage only — see below. |
| Accuracy circle | The shaded ring showing how confident the fix is. Useful to you, clutter to most viewers. |
| Follow automatically | Whether the map keeps recentring on you. Viewers can always drag away for a look around; the map picks you back up on its own about fifteen seconds later, or straight away if they press Recenter. With this off it never recentres by itself, and the Recenter button is there from the start. |
| Trail | The line showing where you have been, and how much of it to keep — 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes. |
| Link to your stream | Adds a button to the map so someone who found the map first can get to the stream. |
Switching something off really removes it. Anything you turn off is left out of the published file altogether — not merely hidden on the page. The map is a plain file that anyone can read directly, so hiding a number in the display while still shipping it would be a promise we could not keep. If it is off, it is not there.
Viewers get a say too. The Options button in the corner of the map lets each person hide the trail, the readouts or the whole info panel, and switch the units to whatever they prefer. Those choices are stored in their own browser and can only ever subtract from what you published — nobody can switch on something you turned off. Your settings are the ceiling.
Weather radar
Switch this on and live rainfall is painted over the map, so viewers can see the storm you are riding into rather than just hearing about it. A fresh sweep arrives roughly every four minutes.
The data comes from the US National Weather Service, and it travels straight from them to each viewer’s browser without passing through us. That means it costs nothing to run no matter how many people are watching, and unlike the popular consumer radar services it carries no licence restrictions.
United States coverage only — including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam. Elsewhere the map simply shows no rain rather than anything broken, so it is safe to leave switched on if you travel in and out of coverage.
Keeping your address private
The obvious worry with a public map is that it ends at your front door. The privacy zone handles that: set a home position and a radius, and inside that circle the map stops reporting a position entirely. It shows hidden instead, and the trail is erased rather than trimmed — otherwise the last visible point would sit on the edge of the circle and quietly aim at the middle of it.
Radius options run from a quarter mile to five miles. Bigger is safer: a quarter-mile circle around a house in open countryside still narrows things down a great deal, while the same circle in a dense city covers thousands of addresses.
You do not have to look the coordinates up. Stand at the place you want to hide, with the router switched on, and press Use my router’s position — it fills both boxes in from the last fix the router sent. That is deliberately the router’s position rather than your phone’s or laptop’s: the zone is measured against the fixes the router reports, and a laptop working from wifi can place itself several streets away.
Set this before your first stream, not after. A position that has already been published has already been seen. The privacy zone stops new ones being written; it cannot recall what viewers have watched.
Putting the map on your stream
Add ?embed=1 to your link and it becomes a clean version with the page furniture removed, sized for a browser source in OBS:
https://streamhelpers.com/m/your-name?embed=1
In OBS add a Browser source, paste that address, and set the width and height to the box you want it to fill. It refreshes itself — there is no need to reload the source.
The map is only useful to viewers who know it exists, so the router dashboard also builds a Map address overlay — a small caption and your map's address, styled to match your other overlays, that you drop on the stream as a browser source. You will find it on the GPS tab under the stats and map overlays, and it appears there once you have chosen a map address. It fills the address in from your account rather than making you type it, so changing your map address later does not leave the overlay pointing somewhere that no longer exists. By default it hides itself whenever your position is not actually going out, so you never advertise a map that isn't moving.
When it goes quiet
If nothing arrives for two minutes the map tells viewers it is offline instead of leaving a stale marker sitting in the road. That covers the ordinary cases — you stopped streaming, the router lost signal in a tunnel, the GPS receiver was unplugged — without anyone having to guess whether the dot is real.
The settings page shows you the same thing from your side: how long ago the last position arrived, so you can tell at a glance whether publishing is working before you go live.
What it costs to run
Nothing extra, and that is deliberate. Your position is written to a small file that our servers hand straight to viewers, so a thousand people watching costs the same as one. That is why watching can stay free no matter how big a stream gets, and why the map does not fall over at exactly the moment you would least like it to.