let's talk gps stuff...

[Nice Goat]

I just bought a Garmin Montana when I was in Canada in October.  It was a store closeout sale, and with the 0.76 exchange rate, I got it for about half it's normal price.  This thread is inspiring me to learn more about its capabilities.

[kylepeterson]

geocaching...


wuuuut  ? Geo who ?

geocaching is a world wide game that anyone can play. there are caches stored all over the planet (it's flat, not round, right ?) that have gps coordinates , which are listed online. lots of times, I will search for caches near me, if in bout familiar with an area. they are usually located near pretty land formations, historic places  , wonders, and occasionally involve long hikes in the quiet woods. this pretty  much is exactly what dual sport riders live for, do it works well for me.

so, where do you get these caches ?

well, you can go online and read volumes and volumes of information from the people that place the caches, or just download the gpx (sometimes it's a LOC file) and go to it. it will include the location, the reason for placing it, some logs of people who have found it already, and possibly some pictures of the location also.

one our resident dual sport  / GPS / caching experts jrou111 can tell you a lot more, and has organized rides that included caching before.

it
is
a
hoot
of
a
good
time

so if he organizes another, you should definitely try to attend. nothing like riding around the beautiful roads of North West Georgia to make a weekend pretty grand. ;-)

here's an example of a"power trail " aka a lot of caches easy to get to, right off the road. (screen shot)

the smiley faces are found caches

you can plug in the coordinates from the screen shot to see where that fun gravel road runs through the forest. it's great for motorcycling a dual sport ;-)

[kylepeterson]

I just bought a Garmin Montana when I was in Canada in October.  It was a store closeout sale, and with the 0.76 exchange rate, I got it for about half it's normal price.  This thread is inspiring me to learn more about its capabilities.

yes! please do!

the more folks that are recording tracks the better. it never fails, if I neglect to press the record button, I'll find all kinds of cool things, and have no way to find them again. ;-)

but if I do press record, I'll have a perfect track to revisit again, and pull several together to make a fun ride.


for instance, just now I recorded a short trip after lunch. asking the way I saw a chocolate goose and some pigmy Indians fighting over a Swisher Sweet.

now I can try and drive by there again over day, when they're old and gray, no one would believe I met them before they were famous. ;-)

but really, I end up recording a ton of useless tracks. sure, it might play to my favor in an accident or speeding ticket, but a lot of them are not worth keeping. I'll delete a few hundred miles of tracks each week.

screenshot of useless track, and gpx included because Thursday...

[kylepeterson]

waypoints.... continued


waypoints are diamonds. sometimes diamonds in the rough, but diamonds none the less.


here are some examples of why I think of them as diamonds. back during the drought of 2016, we took advantage of the low water at Lake Purdy and went exploring. we found "the tops of ancient mountains buried in the mud", Christmas trees (fishing), drill bits (used as anchors once too many times), and... a bald eagle nest. thanks to a couple of recorded tracks, we can dish right on top of those spots, or drag the bottom to see if we can dredge useless things up again.

seeing the bald eagle was pretty awesome and completely unexpected. since the shore line kind of all blends together after a while, in glad I snapped a waypoint after he flew away. since then I've revisited that spot and seen him several times.

I won't post the coordinates of the eagles roost for obvious reasons, but anyone that would like a GPX track to follow, or waypoint, can get it with a simple request via pm.

there's so much more to come....

[kylepeterson]

MAPS

maps are everywhere. paper maps on the wall are gorgeous, mystical things. who hiked into that valley to find the haints ? who discovered hooker point ? how the heck did they get over that gorge ? yup, think about it next time you stand next to older survey maps. somebody sweated through there.

so, where do you find maps ?

openandromaps
openstreetmaps
map quest
Google
navtech
bing
gis services
usgs
USFS
military
gpsfiledepot
old cartography buffs ?


yup, all of those and a whole lot more. and then digitize it !  like I mentioned earlier, you can create a kmz overlay from any picture. snap a picture of the underground waterways below Birmingham, and check out how it lines up with our current roads. ;-) there's a lot unseen in the ham.

some of the stand alone companies have tried to use proprietary formats to protect their maps (for sale) from people who are less than upstanding... but the number of people willing to pay for duplicity in the last decade has shrunk. duplicity ? yes, there are tons of mapping services all using the same ground data, licensing it to each other with little modifications/additions, that it seems pointless to pay for -just- a topo or -only- a hydrology layer, when all of them can be found in one map set from another vender.

so you prefer NatGeo, or Bing hybrid or USGS, or cnna, or Magellan topo, or whatever. cool. there is a LOT of personal preference in which map you see on someone's screen the most often.

using each source of map info to plot routes (the devils footprints) is a great way to see more of what the terrain has to offer. look at little river canyon. it's motorcycle mecca, with lots of stealth camping included, if you know where to look.

[kylepeterson]

Awesome! I never realized the capabilities of Locus! I just used it to record super fun singletrack!

just recording a trail, to find out again later, is the sharpest pointiest tip top of the iceberg. integrating geotagged photos, lodging, ride videos, telemetry data, all come into play, or CAN come into play in today's ride reports. think how cool it would be to have a tour guide speak to you as you round the next curve, to remind you to look right for the view, instead of just saying "left turn on Windermere" in a robotic voice. ;-)

the more accustomed folks get to using their tech, the cooler ours going to get....

[springer]

Dag...bestest GPS thread EVER/\!

[kylepeterson]

moving right along, let's talk sharing.

you have tracks, I have tracks. they should be free (as in information) and distributed. life is way to freaking short to keep everything private/secure/secret. yes, in saying this at the same time that I think every Facebook group should be secret, invite only, cool .



so, track sharing. etiquette says you should have the ride organizers permission, then a dash of common sense, before you're sharing the gpx with everyone on the internet. I have thousands of miles of tracks, some of which should be private forever, but others should be shared often between DS riders and street riders. stuff like back roads around 25, Talledega, north ms, north Georgia, Tennessee, etc are moto mecca. I'd you have legal tracks from those areas, yes  yes yes get your friends excited by showcasing them in the ride report section like klaviator does.

remember, waypoints are diamonds.... if you find a covered bridge, possum pass, booby trap, or gay bar you had a blast at, you should mark it and share.

it takes seconds to drop a waypoint and name it something relevant... which means post processing either on the unit, a phone/tablet, or back home at the Computer is a lot easier to recall why you marked it vs "waypoint 23" .

here's an example of a waypoint that has a great pile of info.... including a URL for the river levels, and at what point the levels are low enough to "hike" across.

[jrou111]

I've been doing a lot of diamond mining  8)

(flags are waypoints, colored/gray/black squiggly lines are tracks, camera icons are waterfalls)

[kylepeterson]

I've been doing a lot of diamond mining  8)

(flags are waypoints, colored/gray/black squiggly lines are tracks, camera icons are waterfalls)



yes, yes you have ! that's what I'm talking about !

[kylepeterson]

no go points...

here's a very short video showing how you can manipulate your route planning around no go points.

say you wanted to avoid a section of highway (malfunction junction anyone?) , bridge, subdivision, or whatever. drop a no go point on it, and if you want that no go to disappear after a while, put a termination date on the point. then you'll never have to clean them up after your routing is done ;-)

https://youtu.be/4nM9Fd29d9s

[IceCold4x4]

Damn.... Talk about information overload. Looks like I've got some playing to do...

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[Fencejumper09]

Hollytree didn't want to share their gpx for the new singletrack so I hacked this picture from Facebook. Thanks Kyle. This will have to work until we get up there and record some tracks!

[kylepeterson]

I'm gonna start a "share your awesome ride track here!" thread pretty soon....

I know Mulley, Brian, James, and a few of you guys could totally pimp that beeyotch out!

having an index you could pull from on any given Saturda morning, load the "crazy train" playlist in the shuffle, and jam the fuck out for a few hours, all courtesy of the mo-al folks !

[springer]

 Has anyone tried "Gravelmap" https://gravelmap.com/ .   Just found it today.  Trying to figure is all out.  One dirt/gravel type road that looks interesting is Warrior Cemetary road off of Blackburn Rd. I am just trying how to figure out a route to get me there. It is  over the Franklin Ferry bridge to get there, so thats not a problem. The problem for me is how to show the route from "where I am" to "where I want to go".