Off-road navigation

[Hiroller173]

Has anyone tried to navigate off-road? I'd like to know if it can be used for running or hiking; i.e. creating a breadcrumb trail that can be backtracked if traveling in an unfamiliar place, calculating distance travelled, or any other off-road functionality.

[markol91784]

I have used My Tracks for hiking. It displays the route and converts it to GPX file if you like. I have used the GPX file in Delorme's program and also uploaded the track to Google maps. You can then see the track on Google Maps. I went hiking once with My tracks and was able to succesfully backtrack a hiking trail. It was pretty acurate. We had to go around a rock on the way (maybe 20 feet) and it showed the difference. I am still experimenting with it. Would love a program that has topo maps for the phone. I did this all with 3G conenction so the maps came from Google. I have tested My Tracks and it will record without cell reception, just no maps to see where you are going. I plan on using my standalone GPS with this. I also want to Cardio Trainer and will report when I have.

[Martin030908]

Sweet app. Thanks for the find.

[markol91784]

Just got some updates and some new apps. I installed RMaps which has offline map access. To get he online maps you have to download TrekBuddy_Atlas_Creator. Compile the maps to the SQl format and put them in the maps folder in the SD card. The cool part about this is you can cache Topo maps, satellite maps, street maps etc. I just went hiking to test this out. I had Rmap running with predownloaded topo maps from teraserver. This program does not record tracks that I know of.

I found another program Cardio Trainer that records tracks. It also has info about calories burned pace distance etc. It is pretty nice and it takes about a third of the battery life as MyTracks. Instead of waypoints you can pause/resume and it records it on the map. This one does not cahe so the screen just shows the trail which is rmaps comes in. You can then upload the track to CardioTrainers website and download as KML or GPX.

My tracks may be better for backtracking since you can zoom in and out.

I used Rmap, mytracks, and cardio trainer for 2 hours and used about 40% of battery.

[rlb]

I have used My Tracks for hiking. It displays the route and converts it to GPX file if you like. I have used the GPX file in Delorme's program and also uploaded the track to Google maps. You can then see the track on Google Maps. I went hiking once with My tracks and was able to succesfully backtrack a hiking trail. It was pretty acurate. We had to go around a rock on the way (maybe 20 feet) and it showed the difference. I am still experimenting with it. Would love a program that has topo maps for the phone. I did this all with 3G conenction so the maps came from Google. I have tested My Tracks and it will record without cell reception, just no maps to see where you are going. I plan on using my standalone GPS with this. I also want to Cardio Trainer and will report when I have.

Good to see another Delorme user. I use it for mountain biking and love it, but I must say it's going to be tough to go back to a small screen w/o touch after spending the last 3 weeks glued to my droid!

[droidreajoh]

I have Magellan Blue Nav would I be able to run that on droid?

[jbr13]

Used MyTrack the other day on a 2 mile walk to some waterfalls. Just wanted to see how it worked. I like it a lot. It shows Elapsed time, elevation change, distance, average speed, current speed, Lat. & Long., and much more. It was cool to enter markers at each waterfall and put the name of the falls. Then when I got home I uploaded the track to My Maps on Google. This allows me to post a link of the track with my photos from that trip.
Great App!!

[PaulL]

You can turn on the "Terrain" layer in Google Maps and it shows topo lines. A little hard to read, though, at the lower zoom level that it forces you to use.

MyTracks is great, too .. you can record a cycling or ski route, and upload it to G Maps or G Earth, and then examine it in 3D or even animate the route in Google Earth.

[SGTiger]

Another vote for rmaps. Its hard to beat being able to download the USGS topographical maps along with gpx trail files to the sd card for rmaps and therefore have it available for offline use.

Hikers are sometimes lucky to get a cell signal for the online maps. And as someone pointed out, the google terrain maps are not near as good as terra server topo maps. Also rmaps allow you to set POIs along the way.

[corndawg56]

I use Oruxmaps, which also records tracks and provides data on current values, such as avg speed, distance, elevation change...etc. The Oruxmaps website provides a free link to the version of trexbuddy you will need to use to create maps. I like it better than Rmaps because it records tracks among other things.
Google seems to restrict the number of satellite tiles you can download per day per IP to 600 tiles, at least for me. I have a delorme GPS and tons of aerial pics off their network. Anyone know a way to put those on a droid?