solo remote back country navigation?!

btw this is what it looks like with cnna on the Garmin Outdoor App that's supposed to be running on their Monterra , but instead it's running on my phone ;-).... but i had to fix the routing with via points, so it would actually stay on roads instead of switching to 'direct' for the last five miles....






i can't believe people paid $600 for these things

My main paper map these days are GTR state maps. They show major dirt roads (but not minor ones) and have some topo info. I mainly use them for seeing the big picture and for planning bailouts when things go awry. These are often available in convenience stores in the states of interest. Or you can just order the ones you want online. They fold up nicely.

I also usually carry appropriate pages from Benchmark maps. These do show minor roads and some show land ownership. I would hate to have to carry the full book for 4 or 5 states that we hit on long trips.

thanks dude!

thanks man. here is GTR: https://www.gtrmapping.com/

No mapset I've ever tried was 100% complete on what is out there. As far as roads that just seem to quit in the mapsets, I look at the areas I'm interested in in Google Earth on the PC at home. You can see if those roads actually end or carry on and where they go.

When I ride areas that area large in expanse that there are no GPS track or route files for and paper maps are lacking, I make my own tracks in Google Earth, being able to see from the air, where tracks and roads go, type of terrain,
I can make loops, bailouts, I can designate points of interest, fence lines, etc. and save those as a Google Earth KML or KMZ file then convert those to a GDB or GPX file for uploading to my GPS unit for use.

If you don't want to do that, you could at least designate several landmark points in Google Earth that you've actually looked at from the air and seen that you could navigate to, save, convert and upload those to your GPS unit. Some units need you to go into its menu for waypoints and select "show on map". And you can often give them they're own unique map icon so you know what they are when you see them on the map.

Most GPS units also having a setting in the menu for adjusting detail and at what zoom level that detail begins to show up.

My first unit was a Garmin 60cx. Good unit but screen size is small and I don't like the function of it's compass. When you stop, it's compass goes haywire and it and the map don't re-orient until you've began moving again for several seconds. The Montana reads true all the time, even when stopped.

I used Roads and Rec for several years. It's detail is a cross between City Nav and Topo, a little of each. Like they tried to make a mapset with the best of both, yet it can still be lacking.

I currently have the Montana 610T with the Topo 100k on it. I recently uploaded the Routeable OSM topo maps on it to try. Not so much that I want to make and navigate with routes, tho I could., but I like to lay out my tracks as routes first in routeable mapsets, as it goes much faster, being able to lay down a point here and there and having the software snap to, following the roads/trails however they twist and turn. Then converting the route to a track in seconds with WinGDB3, designating how fine of detail in routing it needs to be by setting the maximum number of track points.

Tho I have both Mapsource and Basecamp on my PC, I learned on Mapsource so that's what I primarily use.

It's a deliberate decision by the app developer choosing what should be visible at each zoom level. There's no problem or technical limitation, it's just how they decided to do it.

There is no perfect solution, you just have to accept the limitations of the available tools. Fortunately because apps are so cheap you can have a bunch of them to over every situation.

yeah. but there is this weird thing where raster files like aerials scale up and down seamlessly. while vector based data like roads is NOT scaling up and down seamlessly. (which is counterintuitive because the raster data is heavier size-wise).

and there is ALSO an issue where this does not show up until you are our far enough in the back country in a large enough area where you have no ability to find any good landmarks visible from where you are.

and if the scale of the vector data is irregular - you end up with a situation where you /literally/ cannot see the roads you are on because you have to zoom so far in and by the time you do see what road you are on you are so far zoomed in you cannot reference other objects and have any relation to the actual landscape.

i mean i don’t have answers i am just trying to figure out what i see as issues.

and one question i think i have would be to what extent you can have /aerial/ photography downloaded to a phone and use that instead of vector based maps. like what back country map software let’s you used downloaded aerial photography? because that would have topography (in a sense) almost by default.

another question i have is to what extent can i have actual topography on an iphone. like literal USGS type topos.

the limit to Arial photos is
a) set by the distributor
b) set by your onboard memory
c) the resolution of the images vs device
it can be a or b, or a and b

but normally it's just c



if you download hi resolution images, you are more roads. see my earlier post at 5:11am yesterday. there are raster maps from Delorme... with plenty of road detail, but very little of high resolution detail. raster maps are limited by a b c, vector maps are limited directly by the developer

wait. what do you mean “the limit to aerial photos”? you mean the pixel resolution?

i was talking about vector based maps having a problem on phones because they need to be “later manipulated” by the app developer (which oftentimes does not work very well with road layers falling in and out).

whereas i find aerial maps more intuitive an easier to use.

also, what do you mean by “plenary of foda detail but very little high resolution detail”?

hi ohgood
can i please also follow up with you on this delorme map? is it s digital download? how do i use it? on a phone? with what app?
also. i would like to try georeferencing. is there a thread or quick explanation? what /software/ can i georeference a picture of a paper map with?
i mean in some ways this seems ideal. if i am following i could simply take pics from a gazetteer and reference them into my phone.
or shoot. i could just take pics and have a series of photos of the gazetteer labeled by PAGE # or by quadrant and simply open it up from the offline dropbox download folder on my phone.

If you have a geospatial pdf file of a map, you can use the software MAPC2MAP to automatically georeference it. Many MVUM, Travel Management, and state forest trail maps are in the geospatial format.

I also use Google Earth to georeference other image files. This is a fairly tedious art. You load an image over a map and then adjust scale and location and rotation to get the added image to match features on the GE image. I find that creating and displaying routes on some of the roads in the area makes this quite a bit easier. But the difference is between nearly impossible and very hard.


Locus has what sound like a really nice georeference feature where you just align four points in the two images. I have tried it a few times and did not have much luck because of having to do in on a small screen. And the files it produces were not compatible with Basecamp which I use a lot for trip planning.

ok. THANKS for the help. looks like i have some work to do. really i was just hoping for a way to reference where i am and to see the roads. i don’t really need tracks and all that since i navigate as i go. just a sort of garmin style where the fuck am i guess.
i had one issue in the eastern canadian provinces where i was lost and in the rain and i couldn’t find anything to hide under to be able to operate the iphone. so i was planning on getting a 276c loaded with maps for emergencies but i am getting tripped up with loading maps (even after getting a dedicated XP desktop to do this with).
so now i am half thinking to buy the new version of the 276 and just give up on the older garmin USB bullshit.
the other thing i have been trying is a really cool paid app called “foreflight” which is an aviation app. it is super cool and i had thought that since it is aviation everything would be GPS. but after talking to support yesterday i am realizing that they ADDED the street map and the aerial map to complement the aeronautical data. so what happens is the aeronautical data gets “packaged” in the cache when you plan a trip. but the street map and aerial maps are only cached if you /preview/ your route at different scales. and even then there is no way from what i am hearing to know that this data has been cached. which is a shame because it is a super intuitive app with no hiccups that i have found.

1 it's an online source in locus, you can download a LOT tiles, because they're not a higher resolution like Google hybrid are. higher resolution, lower daily allowances for download.

2 georeferencing is super easy. you compare your image with a map, drop (temporary) waypoints that match between both the image and background map, then let the application stretch and skew the image for you. it's pretty simple. the Google earth or Garmin basecamp method of stretch and skew are horribly tedious and annoying.

here is the locus way quick n dirty video




(sorry, you'll probably need to watch it a hundred times to see what is going on)