Hacker News Reader

Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

The gps market is alive and well for marine, aviation and outdoor/offroad/motorcycle niche markets.

fwiw, google maps has download & offline functionality. Click your profile icon top right and select the area you want offline. I use it all the time for backcountry hiking (along with OSM apps) and going abroad where I dont have data.

View on HN

More and more boaters are using tablets & phones as the apps give you access to charts and your instruments (e.g. wind, AIS).

Antennas solutions are increasing to get cellular reception farther offshore that feed into a wifi router.

At anchor, I personally use Organic Maps and drop a pin after I'm properly at anchor. There are specialized "anchor watch" apps but this works for my purposes.

Sailing used to be so simple...

Isn't Google Maps limited to a tiny little 100MB chunk or something? Fine for hiking, less fine for cross country road trips. Here Maps has free offline maps that will let you grab entire countries/continents if you have the space for it.

I enjoy passing the time on airplanes with my phone held up near the window to get a GPS signal, and then look at the names of towns and landscape features far below as I pass them by. It is quite surprising how anything you can see tends to be 10-20 miles off to the side of the plane, until you start paying attention to the quantity of 1 mile cropland squares. Then you truly appreciate how high you are!

This takes 100-300MB per state--I use OsmAnd via F-Droid of course.

I don’t know the limit but it’s larger than 100MB. I currently have about 300MB saved with one chunk (the entire country of Andorra) sitting at 120MB alone.

I dunno if this is as true for Aviation as it was 5 years ago. With Foreflight and the Stratux external GPS/ADS-B in boxes, it's becoming harder and harder to justify in panel GPS for light-sport/hobbyists/GA. I'm willing to bet that in the next 3-5 years we'll see a shift in general aviation to panel mounted "headless" GPSes that communicate with your iPad via GPS and are still coupled to a glass MFD/autopilot, but all the management would be done with an external device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com