Some questions from someone thinking of hopping over from GaiaGPS
I've been using GaiaGPS since 2011 (the lite version), but it's really been feeling like 2 steps forward and 1 step back (or 1 step forward and 2 steps back at times) for a while now. I'm grandfathered into a $30 annual pro plan which is nice.
I really don't need any of the "advanced trip planning" stuff in CalTopo Pro - at this point I just eyeball topo & read up on any passes that look like they could be problematic and then go out for ~10 day mostly XC trips, but I'd be looking at the Pro plan for different layers. I'm unsure of how useful the live satellite will be in app, I find being able to choose between sat passes on eo browser is more useful than Gaia's built in implementation at least. Having gauge data seems really useful.
Use Case:
I originally bought it for backpacking, but have started using it to help map out spots for my partner to work remotely since COVID hit and she went independent. Gaia's cell coverage layers & public lands are very useful for this, and in general I find their Gaia Topo useful for road trips & dayhikes, though I always go to USGS + slope & relief shading while in the backcountry.
Questions:
1) Does anyone have experience importing cellular data coverage maps as custom layers? We have an industrial grade router with dual cellular antennas and plans on ATT, VZN, and TMO that we can bond together for VOIP work calls - having this in my default mapping application is nice, and I have a lot of speedtest / connection note waypoints with custom icons in Gaia. I know I can pay for another mapping application to handle this, but it's nice just having all my waypoints in one place.
2) Has anyone tried importing thousands of waypoints into Caltopo? I generally just drop labeled waypoints while backpacking (labeled digital cairns essentially) and only record GPX tracks if there's a route I can contribute to hikearizona.com when I'm in the SW in the winter.
Here's two examples of passes I've gone over. Everyone has their own system, but this is more meaningful to me than a GPX track jumping all over the place. :)
I assume I'd lose all my icons since they're not part of an open source standard, does CalTopo have the ability to filter waypoint labels by a term? If so I could easily rebuild the ones that matter (e.g. search for ATT, change icons, then VZN and see if I missed any - do a search for trout/fish and change those, etc).
copied over from the caltopo subreddit since neither of these places seem very active: https://www.reddit.com/r/CalTopo/comments/v21cfj/some_questions_from_someone_thinking_of_hopping/
Comments
4 comments
I’m not sure how well your waypoint importing would work, but CalTopo has a cell coverage base layer (both individual networks and a combined coverage map)
Waypoint importing in and of itself worked fine, however importing all my waypoints into a single "map" essentially soft locks it rendering it useless. I opened an issue with support - I don't really do gpx tracks but have thousands of waypoints in the Sierra Nevada since 2012 (camps, crossings, POIs, fish size, XC terrain notes, etc) and backpacking trips often overlap a few existing ones + dipping into some new areas so trying to manually make a new "map" each time to keep within their memory limits isn't super feasible. There's no culling based on display zoom or distance from center of screen etc.
Cell coverage was added after this post was made which is nice. :)
Two more requests I made:
1) “Marker at GPS” would be one of my major interactions in the field. Either keeping this blank, having an ‘x’ to the right to clear it, or having it clear on either focus or keystroke would be great. Gaia removing this functionality when refactoring was the final straw that made me give Caltopo another try. :)
2) While more minor, it’d be nice if when in recreation mode vs SAR that the icon styles would reflect common usage. Points, recreation, and custom should be at the top, with evacuation, fire, USAR etc below. Having a row or two of “most used” waypoint styles at the top would be even better!
And another one I forgot about earlier:
Under display options > coordinates > format (primary and secondary) it’d be nice to have “none” as an option. I really don’t need a translucent layer showing me both degrees and UTM in the field. I’d honestly probably just have elevation, and I imagine most non SAR/professional people would as well or at least just have degrees (I suppose you could use them to extrapolate distance, though eyeballing the legend probably works adequately).
Another nice thing that I forgot about would be to have downloadable map tiles be an arbitrary selection as opposed to quads. In Gaia I can draw a rectangle and download all tiles within it (and just outside the border).
The one trip I tried Caltopo mobile on was centered around four quads and the download was around 600MB which was a bit much for the size of the trip. This change would benefit both end users (faster downloads, less space used) and reduce costs for Caltopo so seems like it'd be a pretty positive change.
Please sign in to leave a comment.