Territory and radius

A Radar’s territory is a single pin on a map plus a radius around it. That is the entire location model — there is no city, state, or ZIP code field, and no list of regions to tick. Where you drop the pin also decides your Radar’s local timezone, which determines the hours it scans.

Setting your territory

There are three ways to place the pin, and they all end up in the same place:

• Search for a place. Start typing a city or address and pick from the suggestions.
• Use your current location. The 📍 button asks your browser for your location and drops the pin there.
• Drag the map. Move the map until the pin sits where you want it. Whatever is at the centre becomes your location.

Then set the radius around it. Once saved, BigFlippa shows the territory back to you as a readable label — “Austin, TX” — derived from the pin, on both the dashboard and the Radar page.

Place the pin where you would actually drive from. The middle of a metro area looks tidy on the map but can put half your radius over places you would never go.

How the radius behaves on each marketplace

This is the part that surprises people: the radius does not mean the same thing everywhere.

Source	How location is applied
Craigslist	The radius is passed through directly. Results come from within that distance of your pin.
Facebook Marketplace	Searches run from your pin, but the radius is not passed to Facebook. Results can come from a wider area than your radius suggests.
eBay	Nationwide within the US. Location does not narrow eBay results.

So the radius is a real control on Craigslist and a rough one elsewhere. If you are seeing Facebook results from further away than you expected, that is why — the fix is to write the constraint into your prompt (“must be local pickup, no shipping”) rather than to shrink the radius. See marketplaces for more on how each source behaves.

Choosing a radius

Both directions have a cost, and the right answer depends on the item more than the map:

• Too tight and you miss listings you would happily have driven to. Sellers a town over are still sellers.
• Too wide and you get alerts for things you will never go and see, which trains you to ignore alerts.

A useful rule: set the radius to the furthest you would drive for this specific item. That is a much shorter distance for a $60 desk chair than for a $12,000 truck, which is a good argument for a separate Radar per category rather than one wide net.

Quiet hours: when your Radar scans

Your pin does more than bound the search. BigFlippa uses it to work out the Radar’s local timezone, and Radars only scan between 08:00 and 22:00 in that local time.

This is not configurable, and it has a few practical consequences:

• A listing posted at 3am is not seen until scanning resumes that morning.
• Your alerts stop overnight — a quiet night is normal, not a broken Radar.
• The window follows the territory, not you. A Radar pinned in another timezone scans on that timezone’s clock, which matters if you are hunting in a city you do not live in.

Changing your territory later

Open the Radar, move the pin or adjust the radius, then use Update location. The Radar’s searches are kept as they are — only the location is rebuilt, so there is no re-scoring burst.

Territory changes count as a criteria change and are rate limited: if the Radar is more than an hour old and was already updated in the last 24 hours, the change is rejected until that window passes. See creating a Radar.

Related: Marketplaces · Creating a Radar · Notifications