maps for expedition touring

[lead-legs]

I use Osmand on a samsung 4 android phone(with a very large battery or charger) . I think you have to pay a fiver for it for serious use (although it was a couple of years before I ran out of free downloads). you download all the countries you need before you go or on route . I would use paper road atlases and a compass and backup with the phone because these things are so complex it takes me ages to fiddle about with it and I still have had some bad incidents of mis-routing which may have been my fault or not.
getting the phone to manage your route takes so much setting up to work well I think it is a hobby in itself. However as a tool to show you where you are , zoom in for terrain and the immense amount of local info in the maps the phone is fantastic and I would not be without it.

The maps are opencyclemap , far better and more visible than google.( pale grey lines on a pale grey background is google maps; they must be mad.)

you do not need a wifi or phone signal to run Osmand. All the info is in the downloads.

If you do manage to work out how to put the gps routes in it the phone will shout directions at you like a car sat-nav, but if you download someone else's gps route osmand does not speak to you you as much as if the osmand itself works out the route. Like most sat-navs osmqnd does not seem to pay attention to hills. Last week it took me up every hill in the white peak and the roaches to get to macclesfield from ripley.

To put a GPS route into Osmand, simply open the GPX file from wherever you've stored it, SD card, Dropbox etc, and Osmand will import it into the correct folder.

so mr smiffy, it's something that connect to a mobile network is it - and then gets your tablet on to the internet?

yup - portable wifi hotspot - data SIM in it - I can connect up to 5 devices at the same time - useful in that I can use it with a tablet or the computer or both at the same time - phone stays switched off and charged for when i need it

19 questions left

Many smartphones will do the same (without needing a separate SIM card, separate box, power, etc).

Ian

I'm a trendy consumer. Just look at my MotoG3 using hovercraft full of eels.

[Sweep]

Question for boris and any others on OSMand - i know that you can view the maps offline but will the routing engine work offline? I know there areca few offline packages where you need to go online to generate a route.

[Sweep]

[- the mifi I find is convenient - esp when Im working - tend to use my car as an office when im on site - mifi is plugged in all the while to 12V outlet - effectively the car becomes a wifi hotspot - on tour in Europe I keep the phone switched off to conserve the battery - the mifi thingie charges fast - with 3 I can buy (or at least I could buy) some cheap data and is a no fuss connection (assuming im somewhere where 3 has a deal with a local provider)

Aha mr miffy, we have a name - the power of words

But if i have this right, jolly useful as it sounds, it appears that you have to rent it at £17 a month. Is that right? That surely makes it bettter to use an unlocked smart phone.

[Sweep]

[even if you have vetted the whole route on google streetview - a practice that I consider borders on the insane rl]

totally agree. One thing to check out some possibly problematical roads or mega junctions on streetview, quite another to virtually preride the whole damn thing.though i fear a fair few folk do.

[Tigerbiten]

Question for boris and any others on OSMand - i know that you can view the maps offline but will the routing engine work offline? I know there areca few offline packages where you need to go online to generate a route.

I don't use OSMand, but do you need an offline route generator ??
I tend to just look at Google Maps (but I may change to OSMand) and just pick what looks like a good route. After a bit you can have a good guess at what the road is like just by looking at a map.
Then hand plot it into my Garmin Etrex 30.
It may take me a couple of tries to pick all the right points on the Garmins map so the route goes where I want it to go. But that just one of the quirks of the Garmin.
If I have picked a wrong road, mainly a major road into or out of a town, it's fairly easy to go off route for a bit to get around the wrong section. It's one of the "fun" things about a long tour into the unknown.
Plus that way I use the more power hungry device less, which means it's easier to keep things charged while on a long tour.

YMMV .............

[meic]

1. GPS - you can get a used Etrex HcX on eBay for £50, and then for free download 14 areas of mapping from OSMAnd (Open Street Map for ANDroid) - this will give you cheap and easy nav inside towns. )Although I paid for the complete set of Garmin mapping for the whole of Europe.) You can put in an address and it'll take you straight there. It will find the nearest bike shops, supermarkets, hotels, campsites etc etc. Invaluable. For crossing urban areas you can look at your paper map and pick a small village on the other side of the town and it'll take you there by the shortest route, after that you can turn it off. Uses AA batteries, easy to replace.

I dont know how you put Osmand on an Etrex, I have it on my mobile phone for driving trips.
To use with an Etrex (with memory) you can download limitless quantities of free mapping, which I think is from the same open street maps as Osmand, complete with contours from velomaps
https://www.velomap.org/download/odbl/

[nirakaro]

[even if you have vetted the whole route on google streetview - a practice that I consider borders on the insane rl]

totally agree. One thing to check out some possibly problematical roads or mega junctions on streetview, quite another to virtually preride the whole damn thing.though i fear a fair few folk do.

OTOH if you do that thoroughly enough, you don't need to go for the actual ride at all.

[psmiffy]

OTOH if you do that thoroughly enough, you don't need to go for the actual ride at all.

Ive noticed with the app for my Turbo that you can do a streetview ride - in conjunction with a recording of the M1 traffic could be the ideal preparation for a tour

[andrew_s]

1. GPS - you can get a used Etrex HcX on eBay for £50, and then for free download 14 areas of mapping from OSMAnd (Open Street Map for ANDroid)

You are probably better off with Etrex 20 or 30 for expedition type touring, as you can put multiple map files on a card. On the HCx vintage, you are limited to a single map file in the device memory, and if it gets too big it makes startup and navigation slow, quite apart from the question of whether it will fit.

in France you need to be wary of straight D roads with low numbers: often they are very busy.

The other ones to be wary of are the D roads with 9000 series numbers, especially where the numbers continue across department boundaries. These are frequently former N roads, for which the financial responsibility has been passed off to the departments.

[meic]

Another problem with the Etrex HCx compared to 20, 30's is that you can only save* twenty tracks of 500 points each. Obviously you can save and load tracks from another source which can connect to the GPS but if you dont have access to such a machine, this track capacity can be limiting.

*in the place where they need to be used, rather than on the SD card where the machine can not access them, nor can they be "dragged across" when connected to a PC, some additional software/browser plugins is needed.

I havent had a problem with capacity on the Etrex, you can just have different microSD cards for different halfs of a continent and you can disable "tiles" which you are not using to speed up response times. I have heard that they do not like larger microSD cards, I stick to 1GB or less.

[matt_twam_asi]

Question for boris and any others on OSMand - i know that you can view the maps offline but will the routing engine work offline? I know there areca few offline packages where you need to go online to generate a route.

I've just tested it out with my phone in aeroplane mode to be sure - yes it does.

I believe the routing engine is part of the OsmAnd application itself, so as long as you have the map data stored on your device you will be good to go.

(edit) - you may need to set it up to route offline though (it's been so long since I installed it, I can't remember what the default is). From the help page:

Use OsmAnd (offline) routing under Settings / (use profile) / Navigation. The other online routing engines will of course cause Internet traffic, about 10-30 kBytes per route calculation or each recalculation.

[molzor]

how about using gps OUTSIDE of europe?

anyone know if i can download maps for garmin touring which cover other far flung places?

[meic]

Plenty of maps for the rest of the world in this link I posted earlier
https://www.velomap.org/download/odbl/
Though I have no idea how good the coverage is in any individual region or country.

[molzor]

Plenty of maps for the rest of the world in this link I posted earlier
https://www.velomap.org/download/odbl/
Though I have no idea how good the coverage is in any individual region or country.

thanks!

[glasgowjim]

Went my second tour (well first real one) with a printed map of the cycle routes of central sweden. Wasnt the smartest move but I got a free road map from a filling station in Nykopping between the two it just about got my son and I where we wanted to go. The bit between Jonkopping and Boras was a challenge as the detour was quite severe. A road side map saved the day as we took photos of it and used that to get past the problem area.

Navigating through towns was more difficult and dont rely on cycle routes . Rund Vattern signs took you well out of the way but even at that you saw more of the countryside than you would by more direct routes.