Wyoming B.S. Thread

That sounds exciting!! Good luck!

 

Cool. Where at in Florida. Devin's family is there.

So you'll be like seasonal/remote/part time every 6 months and work off a boat?

 

starting in jacksonville till jan 1 then going down to the keys then if everything some how goes well enough, the bahamahs for a couple months

more or less thats the plan, yep. huge life upheaval...but ive been in the same routine for the last 8 years, and even though its essentially my "perfect" routine, theres a lot of world out there to see and I want to try something totally new. Its either now, or when im 65, and I certainly dont want to wait that long, nor do I know what the state of anything will be at 65, or if ill even get there.

 

Nothing wrong with that.

I think Devins sister is near there. They are rebuilding some kind of boat.

Giving up the ski season is pretty surprising though. But just different shit as you say.

 

haha let them know ill be around! would be nice to have a few acquiantenaces in the area.

Giving up ski season (hopefully only for a few years, then we go somewhere else and swap cruising seasons) will likley be the hardest thing for me to endure as its my absolute favorite thing in the world, but ultimately I decided I need to be ok taking a break from that to experience other truly incredible things. Skiing will always be there.

 

Good news is you don't have to worry about avalanches

 

ill probably find some other way to inconvienence hundreds of people....

 

Well...I mean it'll be there long as you can do it technically. Physically that is. Haha

Also is it a new boat or did you just buy a boat from across the country site unseen and are headed into a huge project just to make it full sea worthy?

 

ha, neither. I had a specific list of criteria and was particular about what I was going to buy, and flew out there to view it and get a professional survey done.

 

Went to Billings on Monday to drop the wife's Mazda off for service at Bob Smith. Diesel Tremor was sitting in the used lot. Yowzers those things are nice. Would have been more compelled to part with the Taco if they would have come up about 7gs on trade in value (I know you lose your ass on accessories but damn@!) but I came to my senses after running the total cost of ownership on a diesel and the interest I would be carrying on a 90K note.

F to the N-O. Will be a sweet vehicle for someone though. My taco is too close to perfect and it took me 4 years to get it this way. All I need are gears, a tune, and air lockers. No way I am starting over but damn.... that Tremor / Lariat interior is nicer than the furniture I have in my house.

 

Ah good man. haha very un derpy of you

Fullsizes are awesome these days. But damn, pricey. I'd love to get a full size right now for a lot of reasons. But jesus christ they are expensive. I don't know wtf I'm going to do really. Just keep holding ontop my 20-30 year old 1st gens with 300k on them I guess.

 

So what are people using for Nav these days? I was considering switching to GAIA.

Also found an app call ATAK, which is a military based app but is free I think. Looks powerful. I guess you can port APRS data into too.

 

Gaia is - IMO - far and away the best app if you don't already use something else (which of course, you do). I looked at it pretty seriously a year ago, here's where I ended up.

And, despite the fact that I've stuck with BCN, @mrs.turbodb does have a Gaia subscription now, and I just send her the KML, so we have both on every trip. The downloading of maps for offline, and the overlays in Gaia are orders of magnitude better BCN, and if you have an iOS device to use it on, it works really well (doesn't have any of the battery issues that it seems to have on Android).

Oh, and I use Gaia (online/web) for trip planning now. So easy. Way better than Google My Maps even, since there are way more roads, no limit of 10 layers, etc.


(from here)
I'm Starting to Question My Choice of GPS Navigation Software (new)
TL;DR - For years I've used Backcountry Navigator. After checking out Gaia on our last trip, I'm considering a switch.

When I started exploring in 2016, there wasn't much choice when it came to offline mapping applications. That, combined with the fact that the guys who introduced me to my first long trip used Backcountry Navigator, and it was an easy decision for me to use the same.

I started with the free version and ultimately splurged the $12 for BCN Pro (which is totally worth it). Then, when BCN XE (Android and iOS) was released, I loved the idea that it would work on both platforms, so I went with the 10-year plan.

I have to admit that I've been a little disappointed with BCN XE. The maps - and especially downloading offline maps - are better (but not great), GPS accuracy seems a bit worse, and the iOS version still doesn't work all that well after three years of updates.

On our most recent trip to the Inyos, @mrs.turbodb downloaded Gaia onto her iPhone. Not only did it work well tracking our routes, but the default (free) map was significantly more detailed than any map I've been able to find on BCN. I can only imagine that the paid version - with overlays - is even better, so I may be jumping over to that platform for a little while to see how it compares with extended use.

The detail of our location using BCN (left) and Gaia (right).​

(from here)
GPS Navigation Software (resolved for now)
TL;DR - After considering a switch to Gaia, I'm (mostly) sticking with Backcountry Navigator for GPS software because it works better for the things I do.

I mentioned in my last rig review that Gaia seemed to have a lot going for it - and that's still true. It does several things better than BCN (Pro or XE):

• Overlays are fabulous
• Downloading map data for offline use is easy and uses (relatively) little storage space
• The browser-based trip planning/mapping is terrific
• Cross-platform (iOS/Android) support is better than BCN (XE only, there's no Pro for iOS)

However, there are two things that are showstoppers for me, and they are things that BCN handles flawlessly:

1. When out on the trail, creating a waypoint in Gaia requires you to choose a folder every single time for the waypoint, if you want it to end up with the rest of the data for the same "trip." If you don't, it just goes into the top-level workspace and mixes in with anything else that isn't filed, making it impossible to find later. BCN has the concept of "default folder/trip" and any new waypoints, tracks, etc. are automatically deposited into that folder. This makes them easy to find later, export as a group, etc. Given that I create several dozen tracks and waypoints over the course of a trip, this functionality is super important to me... so without it, I can't make the switch.
2. Waypoints and tracks do not have a prefix in Gaia. This might seem like a small issue, but my workflow is one where I mark points of interest as I find them on an adventure and then - when I return home - I manually transfer all of those points back to my master Google Earth file. In BCN, where every waypoint or track is prefixed with the date/time, the ones I added are easy to find (and are stored in chronological order) in the sea of waypoints that already existed for the trip. With Gaia, the new waypoints just get mixed in - alphabetically, since there's no date/time stamp - making it a hunt-and-peck operation to find them all in order to transfer them over.
3. While the maps are significantly more detailed, Gaia doesn't use the screen as efficiently - as seen in the screenshots above - so less of the map is visible at any given time.

Lastly - BCN uses less computing power than Gaia, which is a nice benefit for me, on my (admittedly older) tablet. It's just a bit more responsive, which is nice when you just want to have a quick glance at the map and move on.

At any rate, I'll likely continue to use BCN on the trail, but I might start to use Gaia (instead of Google Maps) for pre-trip route planning and track creation.

 

I have used GAIA when I was full timing it from the off-road travel trailer and had zero issues. I bought the pro license (I think?) which was 30 or 40 bucks a year which gave me a few overlays that I used constantly. The public land overlay was the most helpful for my situation as I loathe RV parks or having to pay to park my taco + trailer and enjoy the outdoors. Being able to download the map sets and work offline was particularly useful in WY and parts of north TX, OK, and CO where cell towers were limited.

GAIA was my primary and my Garmin Montana 700i was secondary and my Fenix 6x on my wrist was tertiary. I don't think you can go wrong with GAIA although I am sure there are other products out there that do the same thing with the same reliability. The market is extremely competitive. Fab Rats out of Sothern Utah do off road recoveries and use onX to locate their customers in the back country. You may want to check out that product. No experience using it though.

 

Interesting. Knew you'd done some stuff with both but I don't keep up with your thread haha

Gaia maps seems pretty good. But I hate subscriptions. I've just noticed most the maps I used in bcn pro now require a subscription as well

And I hate the download process with bcn.

Yeah I need to look at onx again. Plus there are a few others out there now too.

 

Subscriptions do suck, but with mapping there's no other option these days. Understandable I guess, since they always have to keep on top of the map updates, provide the downloads, etc.

One thing about onX, which I've only heard 2nd hand, but seems plausible: they spend a ton of money on marketing an influencers, so you hear a lot of "onX is great" if you go to any YouTube/Insta/etc. place where content creators are doing what they can to make a buck. However, it seems like once you actually get to the app, it's not as good as it's made out to be.

Again, second hand, but figured it was worth mentioning.

 

I thought I was the only one using BCN. Has the XE gotten better over the last two years? I found it frustrating when it was first released.

Curious what map you prefer? I've found a number of roads that in reality don't exist using the forest service map. Not sure when it was updated last.

 

What frustrates me with onx is having onx hunt and onx offroad as separate subscriptions. I enjoy doing both but can barely justify paying for just one.

 

XE has gotten better and worse with various updates (on Android). The guy who runs it (same as BCN Pro) contracts a team in some remote country to do all the development, and I don't think they have quality control where I'd like it to be. Overall though (on Android), it's pretty solid now.

I use the Accuterra (Neotreks Land Use) map, which is a combo topo/public lands map where BLM is a tan, NF/NP/etc is a green, and private is white, which is really great for a quick glance as to where you are. It's still a bitmapped based map though, so downloads are large and take a long time (even with the nicer way of denoting which tiles to download). Gaia is (nearly?) entirely vector-based, so downloads are 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller.

As a comparison - for a MT trip we recently did, Gaia downloads for the western half (essentially) of the state were ~300MB and included topo+public lands+(obviously) roads. The same for BCNXE was a little over 30GB and took 48hr to download.

 

interesting.

fuckin hell thats too long to DL haha


Gaia might be it for me then.

Also I still use GE for trip planning, not that I do that a lot these days. Interesting you used Google My Maps. I hate that feature haha