Anybody have any suggestions? I used to have a Magellan Meridian that I set up for state plane coordinates and it worked pretty well for recon. But...I sold it. Now I wish I had it. Magellan, Garmin, ??? I would like distances between waypoints in feet though - not tenths of a mile.
This is why I always used Magellans.
I think Garmins don't allow for double parallels.
One of my guys has a phone with that V company and he has a gps part of his mapping function, I think it was call mygps or something like that. We have loaded search cords in as a waypoint and used it in heavy cover to get to within 10 feet of a couple of pipes. This was the only time we tried it, but I converted to lat/lon for input to the phone.
For less than the price of a dedicated hand held GPS, you could buy an old iPhone, keep it off contract, run a program called Motion X GPS. I definitely measures distance between waypoints in km, meters, miles, ft, yards, or nautical miles. Coordinate formats include dms, dm, d, utm, mgrs and osgb. Degrees are available magnetic or true in Degrees or mils. I understand you can also download and superimpose custom maps (like a plat you're working from), and it would show your position on that plat. but I've never done that. I use it for mountain biking, lol.
I have motion x and wasn't aware of the custom map feature so I did a bit of looking around.
It looks to me like you can only display info from a "compatible map tile server".
Whilst nice, I don't think this allows you to put your own plans in the background unless you run a map tile server.
Take a look at GPS Essentials for Android. You import a KML file for points.
I've used my Android phone for recon with an assortment of apps, but find storing and importing/exporting waypoints to be tedious. It's enough of a nuisance that I've been using an Ashtech PM2 recently, but it only displays positions to the nearest second. I miss my old Garmin 12CX!
Trimble have got an app for iphone or android, called Trimble outdoors, there is a free version or a pro version for $5.
I use TBC to export the co ordinates or polygons to a google KML file, then convert the kml to a generic gps compatible xml file called a GPX file, this I upload onto my dropbox.
in the field, the selected gpx file gets downloaded from dropbox and shown in Trimble outdoors on my iphone, you see the points loaded and the polygons of lines between them if you have included them into the gpx file.
You can then either navigate to the loaded point using the compass and it gives the distance to the point, or you can track along the route or line until you reach a way point.
Its really straightforward, you can get to within a few meters of the point, conditions dependent , the only new trick I had to learn was to convert the kml file to a GPX file , so that any gps device can read what was previously a google specfic kml file. I use a free to convert website called kml to gpx to do the conversion, just upload the kml and then download the GPX immediately.
The app allows you to tile topo maps or aerial photos in the background, these are streaming off trimble servers I presume, the aerial photos are a few years old.
You can download the tiles of photos or maps for offline mode in case you have no data connection while in the field.
I started using it for mountain biking, but found I could use it fro site recon to.
Definitely worth looking at.
