![]() Depending on the climate you’ll be in, a solar charger may also be an option. We always take a Power Bank for backup on longer hikes if we think we may need it. tracking apps such as Runkeeper, Google Maps or facebook). On longer trips, turn off tracking mode if you don’t need to record your track and set your GPS app to engage the GPS only when you manually request it.Ĭheck which apps have the highest battery drain (iOS: Settings > Battery > Battery Usage) and shut down or turn locations services off for any app that may engage the GPS unnecessarily in the background (ie. We also recommend minimising screen brightness. While all cellular activity is thus disabled, GPS is still enabled. On our smartphones, we turn Airplane mode ON (WIFI, Bluetooth, and Personal Hotspot OFF) to conserve battery life. On multi-day trips, good battery management is key unless you have the possibility to recharge your phone on the way. The watch doesn’t support maps but is useful to record our tracks. Tobi uses both his phone and his gps watch, a Suunto Ambit 3. ![]() Handheld GPS devices also do the trick but since I carry my smartphones with me on hikes and runs anyway, I have never considered an additional piece of gear.įollowing the battery management guidelines below, we manage 5+ days of battery life in the outdoors. We download a GPS track (recorded route to a destination containing geographical coordinates, altitude and distance) in a gpx (GPS exchange format) or kml (Keyhole Markup Language) file format and navigation is super easy, even for me. They’ve become quite indispensable to us in off-road locations, especially when we don’t just care about getting to our destination, but want to follow a particular route. Thankfully, one doesn’t need WIFI or cellular reception for GPS to work and the latest smartphones are all fitted with a GPS chip and therefore work as equally useful GPS devices for hiking, running and walking. However, answering “where am I?” on that map, remains a total mystery, unless I use Google Maps on my smartphone with location tracking turned on, which works well in urban settings with a stable internet connection. ![]() I can more or less decipher a map, a large-scale one with proper labels and such. So, you can probably imagine that the prospect of hiking in rough backcountry terrain is somewhat disheartening. I’d rather not recall the odyssey into the outskirts of some larger cities. It was only thanks to the huge blue-yellow METRO sign that I knew which exit to take in month twelve. For eleven months, I had visited a large wholesale store right next to the highway twice a week. This was until about four weeks before the year was up, and the TomTom broke. I spent one year in the field sales force of a confectionary company, managing a few dozen stores, and thanks to the TomTom I managed quite well. We’d be totally lost even in everyday life otherwise. I simply don’t have one and would never rely upon it.įor people like me, there’s Google Maps and TomToms. My sense of direction has never failed me either. More astoundingly still, we’re hiking, in the middle of nowhere, and the trail has disappeared into oblivion, but he knows which way to go by using the location of the sun. His ability to visit a place once, and then years later still know how to get from A to B in a jungle of small, identical looking, narrow streets, astonishes me. It appears his brain was fitted with an internal, infallible GPS chip. This is simply because maps make him happy, not because we’d be lost without one. Before any multi-day trek, I actually urge him to buy one. Not a single visit to the book store or outdoor shop goes by without him poring over an assortment of paper maps, spread out across a large table.
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