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by drakeandrews
4359 days ago
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You ideally need both. A good GPS to tell you where you are, and a good map (and the sense and skill to read it) to tell you how to get somewhere else. My father once said a GPS is just a device to remind you how lost you are. |
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Our navigation "solution" was a laptop and Garmin GPS attached via USB. Laptop would be powered from car battery with power converter.
For software, we were going to use OziExplorer, which could display raster maps, and show current GPS location on them. Ozi maps are simply big raster images and there is limit of how big they can be.
Before the trip I found a tool that can scrape Google Maps satellite imagery and generate Ozi-compatible maps. So I ran it on the parts of Russia and Kazakhstan we expected to visit and got many gigabytes of cached satellite imagery.
During the trip as we moved along, I would use the tool to generate Ozi map for next area we were visiting. I got pretty handy at doing latitude and longitude bounding box calculations "in head" :-) To give idea of working conditions:
http://i.imgur.com/0k7AEE5.jpg http://i.imgur.com/X01vuNZ.jpg
There were various "oh shit" moments along the trip, one of which was when the power converter stopped working (and laptop's battery was empty because its charging circuit got fried earlier, guess because of the unstable power or overheating). GPS was still running on its internal battery so we did know our latitude and longitude and bearing. But our paper maps were not much use. The population density in steppe was so low, we could just drive until we'd run out of gas and water, and not meet anybody. I think we were shorter on water, as we had to use some of it to top up leaky radiators. Anyway, all ended well when our mechanic-guy found and fixed a simple wiring issue with the power converter, and we got the laptop back on!
So yes, you need GPS and maps.