Tag archives for gps
Best New Apps: PeakFinder Makes Virtual Peak Bagging Easy
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on December 2, 2010 By Keene Haywood How often have you stood before a glorious mountain range and marveled at the peaks and wondered: “What the heck are the names of those spires?” Just a few years ago you would have been out luck unless you had a good map—and some solid range finding skills. Enter recent technology advances…
Travel Tech: EveryTrail Review — Trail Mapping For Everyone (Part 1)
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on August 31, 2010 By Keene HaywoodEditor's Note: Read this review then find a hike in our Best Trails feature, with 30 weekend, city, park, and backcountry options. In today’s world, our mobile devices almost always have the ability to provide location, giving us directions as well as many other location-based services on bright, sharp screens with good maps.…
Gear Review: The Improved Casio Pathfinder PAW5000-1 GPS Watch
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on July 21, 2010 By National Geographic Adventure Contributing Editor Steve Casimiro, editor of The Adventure Life When your phone has a GPS built into it, who carries a compass these days? But what about when the battery dies or you drop it in the drink and the fog rolls in and south looks like north? Short of carrying…
Alaska-Yukon Expedition: Andrew Answers Your Questions on Avalanches, GPS, Socks, Motivation
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on May 12, 2010 Thanks for submitting your questions last week. We sent them off to Andrew when he was in Delta Junction, Alaska. As to be expected, he came through with great answers. He also told us that he's happy to answer more, so feel free to submit new questions at the end of this post. What's…
Travel Tech: How Your iPhone’s A-GPS Works in the Wilderness
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on April 28, 2010 The 3G and 3GS versions of the iPhone have dedicated GPS chips in them. They use a technology called assisted GPS to help locate you in the world. The assisted part comes from using a Wi-fi or cellular radio signal to triangulate your general position. Then, when the GPS chip gets a good satellite fix,…
Mapping on the Move: The Best iPhone Mapping Apps
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on April 20, 2010 Two of the ten hiking essentials involve location: a map and a compass. Know where you are and where you are going, and things will be fine. Now, these two pieces are rapidly being replaced by their digital brethren in the form of smartphones, which are taking mobile mapping in entirely new directions. The poster…
Cartography 2.0: Volunteers Help Map Africa as Never Before
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on February 16, 2010 A high-tech mapping project canvasses the African bush The lioness coughed, and Mark Eveleigh looked up from his laptop. There were seven of them, 400 pounds each—that’s 2,800 pounds of feline—staring right at him. Eveleigh was in northern Uganda helping create a map of Africa, and like so many before him, he was risking his…
Travel Tech: The Second Coming of GPS in Smartphones
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on February 5, 2010 A new wave of smartphone apps is changing the way we get around. Text by Steve Casimiro; Photograph by Joshua Scott After a long day of shooting in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, I was heading back into Durango, starving. Where to go and how to get there? My buddy’s car didn’t have GPS, so…
No Direction Home? Bob Dylan Will Give You Some…
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on August 27, 2009 Bob Dylan is reportedly in negotiations to lend his gravely, iconic voice to in-car GPS units. Years ago, before he sold out to Pepsi, Victoria's Secret, and Cadillac, this would have been cause for some sort of anti-capitalist outrage. But the times they done changed. For his part, Dylan seems as unsure as anyone about…
Alone in the Wild Survival Experiment – Week 4
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on August 20, 2009 Here's the latest video dispatch from Alone in the Wild's Ed Wardle, now in week 4 of his solitary survival experiment. Ed found the perfect, breezy camp at Tin Cup Lake — much better for avoiding the bears. Now it's time to build his new shelter. On July 3rd, 2009 Ed Wardle was flown into the wild…
Travel Tech: Stuck in a Blinding Snowstorm? New “Eyes-Free” Navigation App Sees For You
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on April 3, 2009 Two Google engineers have created a piece of software for the touch-screen T Mobile G1 that will help the blind, and, inadvertently, sighted adventure seekers as well. The software, known as an "eyes-free shell," can utilize the phone’s built-in compass and Google Maps to gauge the user’s position and then audibly relay the results. At…
The Adventure Life with Steve Casimiro
25 Best Outdoors iPhone Apps
Posted by Mary Anne Potts on February 6, 2009 Not even a year ago, there were those who questioned the hoopla over the iPhone. And here we are now, secure in the knowledge that Apple’s micro-Mac isn’t just a radical new phone, it’s a revolution in computing, communication, entertainment, and connectivity. If you disagree, well, you probably don’t own one. And that’s not meant…
