Wyoming B.S. Thread

Oh that's later than I expected for that Saturday. I'm really hoping to depart Boise after work and get most of the way there, my route is 8hours.

 

Oh Mike and I were talking Friday, just gonna find a place to camp somewhere nearby and take it easy, didn't realize Monte meant Saturday haha. Would make sense that Monte would be the closest and have to arrive the latest though. Maybe you can cannonball up and join us

 

I mean I had already said Noon on Saturday haha Why are you getting there so early?

I was shooting for Noon Saturday and yeah Gas is spotty around there.

 

I mean I could take the less interesting drive south of the mountains and take interstate, and save an hour, but I would rather go the northern route, through the mountains, through Stanley, challis, salmon and wisdom. Be a much more enjoyable drive. But I'll want to be off the road before dark to avoid running into any rodents on the road.

Ok cool thanks for clarifying.

 

As of this morning, I am not seeing any campfire restrictions in the areas we will be. So unless that changes in the next day or 2, I'm not going to bring the propane fire ring.

Monte, is your Dad still planning to join us with the new Rivian?

 

No Rivian.

And not sure on joining. He seems kind of Meh about it and is defaulting to my Mom's decision. I didn't get to see her yesterday to talk about so will be calling her tomorrow. I'm hoping they will come. My dad seems tired and needs a break I think.

 

Monte - you have any kml or tracks or anything? I get back into town Sat night; will be prepping some food, then heading out around midnight I think to catch you guys along whatever the way is.

 

I have a GAIA map is all. I can send you something later this week.

 

Sounds good. gaia exports to kml, or you can just share the gaia map, since I use that as well.

 

I would like to have any tracks you have too. When we went to the swell, you sent over something that I was able to make workable in BCN. Please do that again.

 

Been playing around with Gaia last night. Ended up paying for the premium version but seems pretty slick and the additional overlays are handy. Public v private land, cell coverage, etc. I will be very curious about offline operation of the app.

 

Seems like it is super lightweight and downloads easily since everything is stored as vectors rather than tons of bitmap "tiles" like BCN.

 

Granted it comes at a price but it seems significantly more useful than BCN that I used to use. The overlays are really what make it stand out. I'm sure some of the overlays are connection dependent for live updates like weather, air quality, fire locations. I did notice that that area is shown as similar air quality, aka smoke as here. That's a shame, been snowing ash on us this last week. Still looking forward to seeing how this works, really like it so far.



Hopefully today I'll get the awning fixed and get the van loaded with wood and diesel. As usual I'll have about 8 bundles.

 

The interface is way more user friendly as well. I might have to give it a go on my tablet, I tried years ago to use BCN and found it to be clunky and slow

 

Some of the Gaia maps are still bitmaps (so huge) but the vector-based maps are pretty great in general, orders of magnitude smaller (of course), and can be auto-selected and auto-downloaded, which is one of the most troublesome parts of BCN. We always use both now, since the maps have different details on them. Anyway, I think you'll really like Gaia as long as you aren't bothered by the subscription fee.

Creating waypoints in Gaia sucks compared to BCN, but I know most folks don't create a lot of waypoints, so it's less of an issue. And BCNs power consumption is lower, and the app itself is more stable, esp on Android. Gaia was an iOS first app, and that's still apparent when you compare them SxS.

 

Yeah I don't like subscriptions but that's the way it is. It is something I will figure out if it's worth keeping, luckily $60 for a year is fairly reasonable.

Semi related but I've been looking into the weBoost OTR to extend cell coverage as unlike the inReach gear, there's no subscription, but I'm sure that still a compromise. Anyone here have any experience with them?

 

Nice! I quite like it. Offline has been great. You do have to download the different layers you want to have though separately. And yeah weather ones won't get new info without internet obviously. But still overall quite good.

Some roads on it I've found don't exist or are closed or are missing but not a ton.

Haven't had any issues on my android.

 

I think I had a buddy with one and he liked it. Had some kind of booster and said it did help.

 

The weboost is different than inReach, since it’s not satellite…so requires a place that has some cell service to work.

As far as how it works - it works well as long as you are within about 8 feet of the transceiver that mounts inside the vehicle. Closer is better, with a significant difference from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 feet. Think of each couple feet as losing a bar of service. Not the kind of thing you can use to supply cell service throughout camp.

 

Explain the different layers download. I added the different overlays available that I wanted. Not sure how to download the topo map and such so it's usable offline.

Reading about the OTR model the phone has to stay in the mount to work, which is fine, it's mostly for nav and I'm not thinking about it for hiking. Single signal boost too so it isn't meant to be socially used. What I don't know if it can extend the range or is it your same signal area but instead of 1 bar you get 3.