Aftermarket GPS unit for Off-Road --

Recent Tacoma purchaser here and I'm looking for some community input on an aftermarket GPS unit for my taco. I spent the early half of this week wheeling up in the ElDorado National Forest fairly unprepared and unguided. All went ok, but we were a little lost for most of the trek. Got to put my '15 DCSB TRD OffRoad through the paces up there and I'm super impressed in its abilities. Though I appreciate my wife's map interpreting abilities, it wasn't reliable and now that I think about it, kindof unsafe. We had downloaded PDFs of the Forest Service maps onto my mini iPad and complemented with what we could infer from Google Maps and Google Earth and Apple Maps on phone where service worked.

While a detailed topo map would have helped, we do live in the 21st century and there are fancy gadgets for this problem. I've searched a bit across best buy, garmin's website, etc., and found a very wide range of prices and many features I need not apparent. Do i need a handheld, portable (why are these two diff categories!),

I think I want these basic features:

• Ability to see current geographic info in data form - lat/long, mph, elevation
• Live map with current position - ideally a sat image or 3d, but 2d topo or some other method I can see nearby elevation and geography
• Turn by turn directions - input gps coordinates, address, business name, etc., and get directions to it via roads.
• Traffic info - Live traffic information while in metropolitan areas, would be nice if that affected the navigation and it would adjust accordingly.
• Trip Mapping - Exportable data log so I can revisit the trip on another map
• Instant returns -- "take me back the way I came"--kind of thing.
• Pre-programmable route with multiple stops

These are nice-to haves:

• Dashcam built-in
• Portable for hiking or geocaching also?
• Ability to layer additional datasets over the top
• Voice-Prompted
• Cheap! I've seen some crazy off-road racing models for $2K+ and that's way out of my budget. I'd spend in the mid-hundreds for something meeting my needs, but would prefer to spend $100-200.

I'd like to hear back about your usage of GPS while off-roading / OHV trails and what features you use the most. Any specific models that are good for our activity? Help much appreciated.

 

I use GPS apps on my phone but for what people say here

 

This works offline as long as your phone has GPS.

https://www.pdf-maps.com

It has many of these features.

But I use this one for all my non off road needs with much success. I also use Apple Maps and Google Maps. I like Waze but it's taken me to the wrong location more than once. For that reason I use it mostly for committing because it's traffic is the best I've used. I'll double check or use a different nav app for locations that I'm not familiar with.

https://www.waze.com

And some of these.

Waze is free. Can't remember how much the Avenza PDF app was or if it was free. The maps are all across the board as far as cost. Some free, some not. I've spent probably a $100 bucks for maps from National Geographic. You can spend much less than that if you only need or get one or two maps. And it's usually just $6.95 every so often when I need a map of the area I'm in.

What I can say about the PDF map app is that it's by far the best mapping I've ever used off road. Once I figured out how to use it's features, I REALLY love it. I can drop pins/way points and add photos for those pins if wanted. You can trace your GPS steps and it records time and distance while doing so. You can download the same map more than once so you can have separate maps of the same area with different notes and info without cluttering up one map too much. You can measure distances easily as well. There's more but I haven't gone too much into it yet. Like downloading your info to a Google map app on your laptop. Creating and sharing maps.

 

Checking out that PDFMaps now. Looks very cool and helpful. Curious to see how much the maps I need will run. Seems like this may be the immediate solution.
I LOVE the Waze app and use that for now for some route-guidance around traffic, figuring out why we're in traffic, and use it for long trips.

While I do appreciate having all this on my phone... there's just something about a dedicated device for the purpose. Maybe I'm extrapolating the TV/VCR analogy too far here. How accurate is PDFMaps compared to a dedicated device? I thought phones were much less accurate and use multiple inputs (phone towers, gyro/motion, Basic GPS etc) for location reporting? Also--- how bad is this on battery life for the phone?

 

GPS is GPS. It's as accurate as the signal. Phones on the other hand can use both GPS and triangulation of cell signals for an even more accurate position as I believe the .gov limits the accuracy of GPS signals to civilians. That may have changed.

You could get an iPad and download the app and use it as a dedicated device.

Best thing is it's either free or very cheap to try out before you move on to something else if needed.

 

I also like to have a paper map and use it in conjunctions with the GPS map for back road exploring. The GPS pinpoints you and the paper map allows you to get a better bigger picture and to visualize routes and such.

 

Theres a new leadnav app for ipads that is supposed to work really well, a lot of prerunners use the lowrance gps units but they're not as mobile as what you're looking for it seams. I have the lowrance iway600c but I havent used it yet and probably about to sell it, unfortunately.

 

I'm poking around the PDFMaps app and it seems great! Great recommendation and I'll install it on the iPad in a few.

 

I ended up also picking up the Garmin nuviCamHD for the truck. The quality of the video is fantastic and ease of use has been solid. I'll likely use the ipad w/ PDFmaps along with the Garmin. Thanks for the info on those apps, those are awesome. I'll update later with a review of the Garmin.

 

MotionX GPS App on an iPad is the absolute best GPS solution I have found.

You pay $7 and you get the full featured version. You can download any map you want (satellite, road, topo, maritime, etc.) and use it offline (must download maps to the iPad).

Massive amount of features. My personal favorites are the ability to use satellite maps (priceless when you're exploring where there are no mapped roads), the ability to mark a waypoint and add comments/pictures to it (so you can remember what it is!), and the ability to see other vehicles on the map that run the app and share data with you. Makes keeping track of other vehicles in your party very easy.

 

You can put geocaches on the Nuvi's..... which makes it neat while driving. It's been a long time, so I don't know if anything changed... Putting the geocaches in the NUVI is a 'treat'.
GOOD LUCK!