I run Gaia on an older Ipad 4, It sits on my ram mount and yeah it needs a exterior GPS signal. I got a dual XGPS160 that I picked up and mounted on a ram mount and that feeds up to 5 devices via Bluetooth. My thinking was the following....If they run those in small aircrafts and on boats that travel the open oceans it will definitely work for me in even the most remote locations....One thing is for sure there's always an aircraft around you within a few miles give or take and if they always have signal so would I. Well, truth be told my theory was spot on. I get the Ipad to read Gaia and track me perfectly with it. For me what worked to learn Gaia was to use it right where I was at. I started to see what it looked like to drive lets say a road and see it looked nothing like Siri's turn left at the light version even with the different layers applied. Then I actually used it to find local off the beaten path trails which to my surprise might already by a named road just its a dirt or stone road. As I started to go to places where we already wheeled at I started using some of the features like mapping out the track and recording myself leaving a crumb trail just about so even if we got remotely FUBAR lost we could back track. It is sweet cause you have the ability to drop waypoints of potential camps, take a pic of the waypoint for reminder even of how the terrain looked like when you were there. You can add obstacles or views as well its got a ton of little icons you can customize in your tracks too. So as I got used to just doing tracks that way or even at jeep events we would go to same thing recorded our tracks. Then I found through right here in the forums how to import a track. We imported the Georgia Traverse as an overlay and made our own track which had our lines of choice and camp spots we used and even ones we'd save as potential ones. Its pretty cool once you learn all the features it has. I have the upgraded membership on Gaia now but to be honest I didn't take the plunge till I knew how to use it. Its got a bunch of stuff you learn and can do before even upgrading. The upgrade really just gives you the additional maps that are already there for you to use instead of painstakingly searching and adding GPX files manually. If you learn the system she's actually pretty simple and user friendly. Just my 2 cents.