salmonoid wrote:
Bamboozle wrote:
Can you leave a breadcrumb track of where where you walked or hiked so you can follow your way out if you get disoriented in the woods or the map is wrong?
And does the phone in airplane mode do turn by turn navigation on the road without cell service and how good is the satellite fix with a phone in deep cover.
I'm asking because I'm not glued to a phone and don't use one for mapping and I've been in remote places where getting a satellite fix on a really good GPS can be tough because of cover or terrain.
Yes, I track every fishing trip or hike that I make; I like looking at stats and am curious about the pace I fish, etc. I have complete breadcrumb trails for just about everywhere I've walked, fished or biked in the past ten years and a pin for just about every trout landed since February 2012. Satellite fix is fine (and probably more accurate than your 20 year old device - technology does advance with time, you know). You can cache maps in Google maps for offline routing or plan your route ahead of time and load that to the phone. Been doing that for 10 years at least and obviously, I've made it back out to talk about it..
There's no wrong way to do this - if your personal preference is a 20-year old device and it works for you, go for it. Everything you have listed I can do with my smartphone and a few apps (compass, custom waypoints, routes, colorized waypoints and categories). I'm already carrying my phone, so it would be redundant for me to carry a handheld GPS, just like it would be redundant for me to carry a camera. Hopefully, no one blindly relies on technology to plan their routes or for anything for that matter. If I use Google Maps for a route, I always do a gut check to make sure it makes sense. Before GPS routing (handheld, car or phone), I'd always pull out a paper map and review the route before I traveled, just so I'd be familiar with it. I still do that for digital maps. And I rely on my ability to read a digital map to get out of a location, not rely on the device's route finding algorithm. In the event my device goes dead, I also do my best to know about the surrounding terrain enough that I could find my way out if I needed to. Digital maps being wrong is no different than paper maps being wrong - until paper maps were updated with your Exit 87 - Route 903 change, anyone relying on that would have been going out of their way too.
Responding to some of the comments on your latest post, the same battery pack that can recharge my cellphone can also recharge my headlamp, my Bluetooth speaker and my handheld torch. That's the beauty of USB (micro or USB-C). High-end smartphones are waterproof. Lower-end ones can be made waterproof with a case. And yes, some people do that. Dense canopy and cloud cover will have no more impact on a cell phone for seeing satellites than a handheld GPS.
FWIW, my smartphones have been Samsung Galaxy Notes 2 and 4, and I recently upgraded to a much lower end Moto G Stylus. It's battery life is excellent (hiked the whole OLP, with GPS on, no recharge), it takes good enough pictures and I paid about $200 for it (minus the monthly cell service fee). My only complaint is I discovered that unlike Samsung devices, it does not have an ANT+ interface, so my newly purchased Garmin Tempe, for adding temperature logging to my breadcrumbs, won't work until my ANT+ dongle arrives.
Do you ride a horse to your destination or have you upgraded to a car?
