Thinking about trying GPS again. Is there a model that would satisfy me?

[kepPNW]

Wait, is this Adam asking a question that he originally answered?

Like you remember everything you posted 3 years ago?

Heh, I was gonna snicker, myself, but saw you were only stating the version you had installed at the time.

[retired jerry]

I don't remember what I posted 3 minutes ago

[aiwetir]

Caltopo iOS beta

You need to install Apple's Testflight app


https://testflight.apple.com/join/dLwq62XW

[blantow]

Hi wonderful humans - Ben from CalTopo here. Someone sent us this thread in our help forums asking about offline downloads and storage on SD cards, hope you don't mind if I jump in here and share.

CalTopo offline downloads are a feature of a paid account. Utilizing caching to try to download tiles will be at best unreliable and we really do not recommend it if CalTopo is the navigation method you're relying on. Tiles cache at a specific location and zoom level and its hard to ensure you hit every spot to cache them. Caches are intended to speed up app performance primarily.

We did enable storage of map tiles on SD cards, but you cannot save directly from the app due to how Android likes to restrict things. Instead if you download tiles and then move them to your SD card using a 3rd party app or computer it will work. We hope to improve this in the future but at this time that's the reality.

Looks like someone posted the iOS beta link, thats an open beta, feel free to use it! More info is available in the CalTopo blog. You'll see the iOS version in the app store soon, but Apple is slow to approve apps.

If you ever have problems or feature requests please reach out directly to us at [email protected], we'd love to support you!

Happy trails.

[mjirving]

Sweet. Love Caltopo. Can’t wait to try the iOS app.

Thanks!

[adamschneider]

We did enable storage of map tiles on SD cards, but you cannot save directly from the app due to how Android likes to restrict things.

I know you can't put stuff just ANYWHERE on a card, but your app would be allowed to write to the /[externalcard]/Android/data/com.caltopo.android directory, wouldn't it? That's what OsmAnd and Backcountry Navigator do.

[Bosterson]

Thanks Ben! I have a paid subscription and am looking forward to trying out the app out in the field - I've been using Caltopo for years to generate PDF maps for Avenza, but this seems faster. It would be great if you guys can add direct SD card support in the future, though that's good to know there's a workaround if space is an issue. For the saveable layers, would it be possible to add the normal shading layer as a choice for the tiles you can download? The USFS 2016 map is good to have but is so flat without shading compared to the Mapbuilder Topo layer. Thanks for all the work you guys do, Caltopo is the best!

[blantow]

I'll throw both those things on the dev board but neither will happen in the next few weeks. Packaging more layers for download is certainly something we would like to do but since we haven't built out the layer opacity feature fully yet downloading shading layers probably is below opacity type functions.

There were some other issues with saving directly to SD cards that I'm not intimately familiar with. Most newer phones aren't coming with SD cards or are coming with more and more internal storage so we pushed it down the priority queue to get some other higher priority features developed.

[pnwnerd]

I have been using OsmAnd for probably a year and it's been great. Got the whole state in topo and some sort of shading overlay which I'm not sure if I have enabled or not. I played with the options for the first week or two I had it installed, and since then it's just worked and hasn't broken... exactly the way I like things.
I also use Google Maps, since you can download maps for "offline" use. Mostly as a backup and because OsmAnd doesn't show up on my truck's stereo screen (is that even what they're called these days???) but Google Maps does.

[adamschneider]

Yeah, I've come to heavily rely on OsmAnd myself. And I recently discovered that I can bulk-download map tiles for it on my Mac using "Mobile Atlas Creator": https://mobac.sourceforge.io/