ultraflight
Race Dog
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2017
- Messages
- 502
- Reaction score
- 240
- Location
- Cape Town northern suburbs.
- Bike
- BMW F800GS
I have been doing extensive research on navigating a bike on adventure rides... from short circuits to multi-day tours. I think I have finally found the perfect solution. Read on if interested.
Other than buying a very expensive Garmin Zumo, their dedicated bike GPS, you could try the somewhat less expensive models such as the Montana. But even these have some serious problems for adventure touring.
What about using your smartphone to navigate? Here are the pros and cons...
This is how I go about planning a ride:
I create a route on Garmin Mapsourse or Basecamp.
A route connects several waypoints together from your startpoint to your destination. When you transfer this route to a GPS, the GPS might use different roads to connect your waypoints, so you end up following a route which may be significantly different to what you planned. The solution is to convert the route to a track on your PC, then send the track to the GPS, which then cannot change from what you had planned... however, you get no voice guidance along a track, so you need to visually follow a line on your screen. I usually set the zoom to see about 5km ahead, and check the screen at every intersection or every possible turnoff. However, more than once I have missed a turn and had to backtrack.
If you do not want to layout the cash for a GPS, then there are a few options to use your smartphone to navigate. There are many GPS apps that will get you from your current location to any given point, but that is not what we are looking for. We want to follow a pre-planned route, following specific roads, not let the app select how to get to your destination.
Perhaps you planned the route yourself, or you are joining a ride and can get a GPX file from whoever planned the route, or you found a GPX file online and want to explore that ride...
To this end, I was recommended an app called GAIA GPS (IOS and Android). It was not cheap, but it served my purpose very well on some multi-day tours with lots of lesser known gravel roads. It uses various maps including OpenStreepMaps and a few others, most of which can be downloaded for offline use for areas where there is no cell signal (and to pre-download maps on WiFi rather than paying for mobile data).
I read about OSMand on this forum. Downloaded it and played with it on my iPad and iPhone. Found it to be rather buggy, frustrating to use and not at all user-friendly. A far cry from being usable at all. Perhaps the Android verion might be better.
Then I discovered Easytrails GPS which had some major advantages, such as a much clearer (compared to Gaia), broad and bright Orange track to follow which was a huge improvement when on a rough dirt road. Unfortunately the Android version sucks but the IOS version works well, and its a lot less expensive than Gaia.
Easytrails can read out the names of waypoints as you approach them, so you could name them in some useful way, e.g. "Turn Left onto the R312" or similar. This overcomes the voice guidance issue in a way.
However, I have now discovered what could be the absolutely perfect app, called Scenic. It ticks off all the boxes. The free version allows you to test almost all of the features. It makes planning a route easy on iPhone or iPad if you want, or importing GPX almost every way you can imagine, offers full voice guidance even if you started with a Track instead of a route.
Unfortunately only on IOS at this stage, I don't know if they plan an Android version.
I am now tasking my very old iPhone 4 as my dedicated navigator on my bike, with my newer iPhone 7+ as a backup.
If interested, have a look at:
www.scenicapp.space
Other than buying a very expensive Garmin Zumo, their dedicated bike GPS, you could try the somewhat less expensive models such as the Montana. But even these have some serious problems for adventure touring.
What about using your smartphone to navigate? Here are the pros and cons...
This is how I go about planning a ride:
I create a route on Garmin Mapsourse or Basecamp.
A route connects several waypoints together from your startpoint to your destination. When you transfer this route to a GPS, the GPS might use different roads to connect your waypoints, so you end up following a route which may be significantly different to what you planned. The solution is to convert the route to a track on your PC, then send the track to the GPS, which then cannot change from what you had planned... however, you get no voice guidance along a track, so you need to visually follow a line on your screen. I usually set the zoom to see about 5km ahead, and check the screen at every intersection or every possible turnoff. However, more than once I have missed a turn and had to backtrack.
If you do not want to layout the cash for a GPS, then there are a few options to use your smartphone to navigate. There are many GPS apps that will get you from your current location to any given point, but that is not what we are looking for. We want to follow a pre-planned route, following specific roads, not let the app select how to get to your destination.
Perhaps you planned the route yourself, or you are joining a ride and can get a GPX file from whoever planned the route, or you found a GPX file online and want to explore that ride...
To this end, I was recommended an app called GAIA GPS (IOS and Android). It was not cheap, but it served my purpose very well on some multi-day tours with lots of lesser known gravel roads. It uses various maps including OpenStreepMaps and a few others, most of which can be downloaded for offline use for areas where there is no cell signal (and to pre-download maps on WiFi rather than paying for mobile data).
I read about OSMand on this forum. Downloaded it and played with it on my iPad and iPhone. Found it to be rather buggy, frustrating to use and not at all user-friendly. A far cry from being usable at all. Perhaps the Android verion might be better.
Then I discovered Easytrails GPS which had some major advantages, such as a much clearer (compared to Gaia), broad and bright Orange track to follow which was a huge improvement when on a rough dirt road. Unfortunately the Android version sucks but the IOS version works well, and its a lot less expensive than Gaia.
Easytrails can read out the names of waypoints as you approach them, so you could name them in some useful way, e.g. "Turn Left onto the R312" or similar. This overcomes the voice guidance issue in a way.
However, I have now discovered what could be the absolutely perfect app, called Scenic. It ticks off all the boxes. The free version allows you to test almost all of the features. It makes planning a route easy on iPhone or iPad if you want, or importing GPX almost every way you can imagine, offers full voice guidance even if you started with a Track instead of a route.
Unfortunately only on IOS at this stage, I don't know if they plan an Android version.
I am now tasking my very old iPhone 4 as my dedicated navigator on my bike, with my newer iPhone 7+ as a backup.
If interested, have a look at:
www.scenicapp.space
