[pct-l] GPS App question

[Jim Banks]

Wow! Thanks for all the information, it is very useful to a novice GPS user
like me.  

I-Beam

-----Original Message-----
From: Pct-L <pct-l-bounces at backcountry.net> On Behalf Of Town Food
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2018 1:10 AM
To: pct-l at backcountry.net
Subject: Re: [pct-l] GPS App question

Halfmile's app works on both Android and iOS.  I understand the iOS version
has an additional mode that displays a map, but I haven't used it.

As for GPS, my understanding is that all US cell phones have a full GPS in
them due to E-911 requirements.  Many also support A-GPS, which helps them
get GPS locks faster, but does not replace real GPS.  If your phone didn't
have a GPS, it would stop giving driving directions when you left phone
coverage on a long drive.

I used both Halfmile and Guthook's on my 2016 thru, and Halfmile was
generally my go-to, though I often looked at Guthook's for a second opinion,
particularly when I was hoping there were more tentsites or water resources
than Halfmile mentioned.  I also used Guthook to read its bulletin board of
comments from hikers on each waypoint.

I also wanted to recommend OSMAnd, which has a lot of coverage of non-PCT
trails and roads near the PCT.  This comes in handy at junctions and on
side-trips.

Hikerbot is new and has gained popularity recently, and I'd try that if I
were hiking soon as it has features I found myself wishing for in the other
apps.

Here're my impressions of the three I did use:

Halfmile's is a no-nonsense, all text, fast way for a skilled user to get
well-vetted information about the trail.  It's conservative with its choice
of waypoints -- other apps will mention marginal campsites and water sources
that Halfmile skips.

So, if you were to just use Halfmile's app, you would be unlikely to find
yourself at an unusable campsite at the end of the day or a dried-up water
source when you're thirsty.  You also wouldn't spend excessive time
filtering through data when planning your destinations for the day.  If you
just want to hike and play it safe, Halfmile's data is ideal.

The sparseness of the waypoints can be misleading, however.  Sometimes it
will show no tentsites for many miles, making you think you should make camp
early if you see a tentsite.  But, it might be blank because the local
terrain makes tenting easy in many places.  There's no way to know ahead of
time.

Halfmile's app takes some getting used to.  With no map, you can't tell
which way to go at a junction (though if you get a few dozen feet off-trail
it will tell you and point you towards the right trail).  If you don't like
doing a lot of math with mile offsets, you need to learn to use the
"simulate position" function, which makes it act like you're at another
waypoint (e.g. the campsite you're planning on sleeping at tonight).  The
descriptions of the waypoints are terse, and the layout can be confusing.

I found it potentially-dangerously confusing that waypoints on spur trails
are included in the same list as waypoints on the PCT, and it will tell you
the distance to spur trail waypoints in a way that makes 
it sound like they're on the PCT.   For example, if you were at Highway 
40, it would have a pink-shaded entry that said "North 4.11 mi Highway
80 Rest Area", which one might assume means that if you go 4.11 miles North
on the PCT, you'll reach the Highway 80 Rest Area.  Actually, it means you
have to go some distance on the PCT, take a spur trail, and some more
distance on the spur trail, which together will add up to 4.11 miles when
you reach the Highway 80 Rest Area.  So, long story short, it's important to
understand that pink waypoints in Halfmile's app are on spur trails.

Guthook's guide has a lot more features.  It shows your position on a map,
which is intuitive.  It has photos of many of the waypoints, and it includes
many of the more marginal water sources and smaller tentsites. 
It also has a bulletin board on every waypoint, where users of the app can
leave comments.  This is very useful for getting recent information about
unreliable water sources (it's not as reliable as the official Water Report,
but can fill in gaps in its data), as well as candid information about
businesses, suggestions about where to cross a river, etc.

However, most of the features require downloading data intermittently (e.g.
when you're in town), and doing so can be confusing and unreliable.
Different kinds of data can be downloaded from different screens, so it's
not straightforward to make sure that you have all the data for an upcoming
stretch.  The bulletin board data is silently downloaded in the background
on occasion, so there's no way you can make sure you're up-to-date with
that.  All of this is made more awkward by the app's payment scheme, which
divides the trail up into sections, and makes other sections look empty if
you have the wrong one selected.

I did notice that Guthook's track didn't always follow the official PCT
signage, though the differences were minor (e.g. a 100-foot shortcut around
a field).  This might be an issue for sticklers.

It also drained my battery while it was not running, until I enabled a
power-saving mode on my phone that prevented certain background tasks from
running.  Most Android phones have a feature in the Battery section of the
Settings program that will show you how much power each app has consumed --
it might be wise to check this once in a while to make sure Guthook is
behaving well.

OSMAnd is a general-purpose mapping app, not meant for the PCT specifically.
It can give driving directions, for example.  It differs from programs like
Google Maps and Apple Maps in that it works offline, and uses crowdsourced
map data.  You need to download the map data beforehand, one state at a
time, and these files are large.  But the process is simple.

The resulting maps have much more thorough coverage than any of the
PCT-specific apps.  Most PCT-specific apps only display a few side trails,
generally those with particularly interesting destinations. 
OSMAnd's coverage is more like an atlas, covering everything (including
fairly thorough trail maps).  If you ever need to navigate near, but not on,
the PCT, OSMAnd can help.

It can also optionally download geotagged Wikipedia articles (of which there
are many), and display them on the map.  This can be nice if you like to
spend time in camp reading about where you were or where you'll be, or plan
detours if something interesting is nearby.

It can also display contour lines on the map, though this slows it down.

Going through all of OSMAnd's features is dizzyingly complicated, but only a
few are necessary for PCT purposes.

Not being a PCT app, the PCT is just another dotted line in OSMAnd.  You can
download Halfmile's GPX track and import it into OSMAnd, however, which will
make the PCT a bright red line.

  -=Town Food

On 07/11/2018 10:49 AM, Tim Umstead wrote:
> I used Halfmiles app on a Motorola phone and it worked just fine.  
> Halfmile has the most up to date GPS points.  In most cases Guthook 
> data lags behind Halfmile's.  Last year Guthook updated his points using
Halfmiles data.
> With all the trails Guthook covers he goes a long time between updates.
> 
> I use Guthooks app on the CDT.  There are things I liked and disliked 
> about both Halfmiles and Guthooks apps.  For me, I would like a 
> combination of the two.  Thats not going to happen.
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