[Cdt-l] GPS & Battery Usage

[Thomas Jamrog]

Very useful details on battery strategy when carrying iPhone and GPS.  Thanks.  
Uncle Tom 

On Mar 13, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Peanut Eater wrote:

> I didn’t leave mine on – I just switched it on when I felt I needed it. With the average period between resupplies of 5 days, I just didn’t want the challenge of carrying all of those batteries that would be needed if I had it switched on for the 15 hours a day that I was walking. I carried a DeLorme PN60W that comes with a SPOT. I also had an iGo charger that took a couple of AA batteries and could recharge my phone if needed. That way I had a spare pair of batteries should any one of the gps, Spot or phone need them before the next resupply. At each resupply I would get another pair of batteries – the 8X lithium version. I would only switch on the gps when I needed to check my location. Occasionally, I’d leave it on but that would typically only be in areas where there was lots of snow and lots of trees where normal map reading was more challenging. As you point out, the disadvantage of turning it off is that if you do go wrong there isn’t a track in the gps that you can follow back to where you went wrong. When that happened to me I would just set a bearing back to the trail usually somewhere ahead of me and that was sufficient to recover. Obviously you have to weigh up the terrain and pick an appropriate route back . Overall, I ended up with more batteries than I needed so typically I could go 5 days with three devices and not run out of power. The Spot was only on to send messages so that never needed new batteries. I carefully power managed the phone so I didn’t need to use the iGo very often. The gps was the biggest power user, but with care I got on average about a week on a pair of lithium AAs. I didn’t experiment with rechargeable batteries because I didn’t want to have to carry anther charger.
>  
> Hope that helps.
>  
> Peanut Eater
>  
> From: cdt-l-bounces at backcountry.net [mailto:cdt-l-bounces at backcountry.net] On Behalf Of Barbara Nash
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 6:10 AM
> To: cdt-l at backcountry.net
> Subject: [Cdt-l] GPS & Battery Usage
>  
> I have a couple questions about people's experience with GPS/battery usage on the CDT. I have a Garmin 62S. 
>  
> 1.  I have read a few folks saying that they keep their GPS on continually/never turn it off while walking . . . so maybe 10 hours/day.  I can see that this isuseful if you need to backtrack, might make it easier to "find" yourself and keep in synch with a paper map.   But . . .  I am wondering if folks generally do this or if they turn their GPS on and off . . . which might conserve batteries.
>  
> 2.  The best battery options seem to be the widely available lithium batteries (disposable) or a rechargeable like Sanyo Eneloop.  Has anyone used the Eneloops.  Did they hold up to the published stats . . . 15-20 hours and hold their charge (for practical purposes) forever when not in use.  Did you have trouble dinding places to recharge your batteries on the CDT.
>  
> 3.  Anything else you would like to say about this topic?
>  
> Barb (aka Late Start)
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