Suggestions for GPS device.

[Jeffrey Hanke]

Arghh. Above should say Garmin vs Harmon or harming. Darn spell check

 

[Wanderer]

Yep pulled the trigger on the magellan for me it is perfect The thing about tablets and gps as a nav device is this they are great if u know you are going to be in a specfic area . Then you just down load the area it will be a small file say you are thinking death valley easy and done butbwhat if yiu old collegebbuddy calls and says hey lets domsome eastern Washington and oregon and you boss says either use your 2weeks of vacation or loose it the death valley down loaded tiles wont help. So for me i want the whole western usa. Now to do that in sdvance is very time consuming and cab be immensly frustrating. I downloaded most of ca wa ore nev and az. It took the better part of a week just down loading these huge files like 250 000 tiles only to learn the all of these programs have limits i know gaia is 100,000 tiles. I have bcn alpine quest abd topo usa all have great topo maps NONE are intuitive or easy to use all have file limits not sure how to discover what those are so when you consider a decent tablet is 100 plus then you need at atleast 128 gig card $75 ? Ram mount or similar $50? These are guesses, you are pushing $225 you can buy a magellan 7 jnch preloaded for 299 imho the logic speaks for itself!
All that being said i am still trying to figure out how to down load the entire west .
ON ALPINE QUEST
I AM A SERIOUSLY FLAWED INDIVIDUAL.
See i am old school and oart of my college education as a geologist dealt with reading and navigating using only 24k topo maps.

 

[Jeffrey Hanke]

I hear you. I haven't jumped into Gaia to any degree yet. I have app, but thats it so far. Where did you download the area maps/tracks you mention above.

I have a Garmin Montana 610t with USA Topo which I've had for some time. I used it in my jeep and worked great as both road and off road gps. Just not sure it will have all the off road areas people discuss in these forums. Im planning a trip from NC to AZ this spring, hope to make it to the Overland EXPO. Would like to do some exploring on the way there and back.

 

[Wanderer]

Go to magellan explorist they have a site that you preview all that the gps does you get a feel for it pretty quick . Like a lot of things ir has a few quirks the biggest in my view which is easily fixed is spe)ing. Say you want to preview a trail unless you spell it exactly right it won't showbup. As you may hsve gathered from my posts i can't type worth beans.. to work around if you know thecity it is close too you can search that and it will give you a list of the trails nearby or you can use the mao feature to find it.

As for tablets i think they are s good way to go lots of options imho their draw bscks are it takes forever to down load maps you hsve limited file sizes so many tiles at this zoom level or that zoom level the less zoom level = greater area but less detail. More zoom level = less coverage area. So if you wanted the whole state at decent detail say zoom level 15 it would tske you weeks to download each program has a maxium number of tiles it csn load. That is hard to determine so far in my ventures into this gaia is the only one that mentions the number of tiles at 100,000 . I am not sure how much effect the actual hardware has on it. I SUSPECT it has to be similar to a computer.in that if the tablet gas 128 gigs of storage you can probably get a lot on it another thing i dont know is do tsblets hsve the equivalent of ram in otherwords could you get a tablet with 128gig of storage and say 32 gigs of ram that is rif tablets even have ram i think (read wild guess) that the ability of a tablet to process info is also a huge factor.. all that being said iwould like to know how much area folks have down loaded to their tsblets and at what zoom level how much storage etc thier tablet has?

 

[Wanderer]

Some background info. 2 years ago at expo west my sone and i got over the crowds and decided to go explore. So we loaded up our 125lb golden/moose mix and my petite by comparison and went exploring i was runnig bcn on a lenovo tablet he had topo usa on an android phone free version he had so much better coverage and response.
some was i belive because he had cell coverage i guess. So i bought topo usa pro for 11bucks it worked pretty well on the tablet but his phone did better in terns of detail or zoom levels i learned that i had to down load the areas i was interested in exploring prior to using it. When i returned home i proceeded to down load ca,ore wa nev and az most non city parts it woukd often take 2or 3 days of the tablet loading an area at zoom level 15. These were big files some 250000 tiles at zoom 15.. THEN when i went to test it, I would find that although i down loaded to say zoom 15 i woukd only be able to access say zoom level 9 or so. I am still not sure wgat the lijiting factor is . IS THE HARDWARE OR THE PRIGRAM? Bottom line for me and what i view as kind of the ultinate set up woukd be a 10 inch screen in good detail and color that covers the entire west with topo as good as a usgs map.
I once was close to that i had a lowrance chart plotter with a 10 inch screen snd had it built into the center stack of a 2007 chevy z71 pickup but then i had to go and screw it up by putting a coil spring conversion on it that the worst set up ever. I would have been better off with a horse drawn wagon man it was awful

 

[Bert Fox]

I boot loaded an Amazon Fire HD10 to run google aps and downloaded Gaia to it and bluetooth it to my InReach Explorer, only tried it at home so far, but will be using it this month in the woods, will let you know how it goes.

I have an HD10 Fire 64 gb. I installed a 256 sd card. When I try and download Gaia or BCN, it doesn't find my device. I also have the dual gps puck. How do I get it to find my HD10 2017 device?

 

[Bert Fox]

Does your puck connect through bluetooth or Wi-fi, I'm guessing bluetooth, therefore you need to turn bluetooth discovery on the tablet in order for the puck to find it.

If it's Wi-fi, then it depends on your setup, does your vehicle have it's own Wi-fi network? If so, they both should be connected to that network. Otherwise you need to directly connect to said device through the wi-fi options menu

 

[Bert Fox]

I wasn't clear. My gps puck does connect to my tablet via bluetooth. When I try and download Gaia or Backcountry Nav on the app store my devices only show my old ones, not my current Fire HD 10

 

[tacomatt76]

I have made quite a few. Depending on specific use I will 3d print a case for it. Well I did, still looking for a printer that will hold up to use on the road. Makes me start to consider a trailer. Raspian for is is fine as you can then add whatever packages you need. Not frankensteinish if done correctly. I will be playing with the ham radio hat in the near future. The pi is very stable and I used one for a year as my arps box before I had my campsite robbed in Georgia back in late September. Remember devil dog, never rely on just one systen. 2 is 1, 1 is none.

That'd be a fun project. I have an Arduino. I could do the same. But what software do you use with it?