Create a location QR code

Addresses are approximate and coordinates are not. A postal address gets somebody to a building; a pair of coordinates gets them to a gate, a pitch, a trailhead or the third door round the back where deliveries are actually taken. This code encodes a geo link, which is the standard both iOS and Android understand, so a scan drops the pin exactly where you put it rather than where a search engine guesses.

How to fill it in

• Use decimal degrees, such as -1.28638 and 36.81722, rather than degrees, minutes and seconds.
• Latitude goes first and runs from -90 to 90. Longitude runs from -180 to 180.
• South and west are negative. A dropped minus sign is the usual reason a pin lands in the wrong hemisphere.
• Copy the pair out of a map app by holding a finger on the spot, which beats typing them from memory.
• Five decimal places is roughly a metre on the ground, which is more precision than a doorway needs.

Where a pin beats an address

Festival gates and campsite pitches that have no street address at all. Building sites, where a delivery needs the compound entrance and not the registered office thirty miles away. Trailheads, bothies and fishing spots. Meeting points inside a large park. Farm gates on a lane that has six of them. Assembly points painted on a wall, where a visitor who does not know the site can navigate to the right corner of the car park instead of following the crowd.

The pair of numbers is checked and encoded here in the page. No map tile is fetched, no address is looked up and no position is uploaded, so building the code tells nobody, including us, where the point is.