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Walking with a sat nav

Monday, August 26, 2013 15:45

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Traditional walkers who favour big leather boots and
hairy socks still seem to look down on satellite navigation for walkers. Yet bit
by bit the practical value of these remarkable products of the electronic age are
creeping up on us.

So I recently bought one.

My gadget, from Satmap, isn’t quite the same as a sat nav
designed for cars in that it knows nothing of footpaths and how to walk from A
to B without getting lost. Instead it has a GPS location map linked to another
map such as a digital version of a standard OS map. So basically, the thing is
an electronic map which records your route and shows your current position. It does far more of course, but that’s
the pared down nuts and bolts of the thing.

In fact there are numerous extras such as a compass, altimeter and facilities for geotagging photos, not all of which I’m likely to use, but modern gadgets are prone to
include a host of unwanted frills and I’m used to ignoring the bits I don’t
find useful.

My wife and I originally saw the capabilities of these
devices while walking the Cumbria Way with a small band of pensioners from our
local Ramblers group.

The Cumbria Way is a lovely walk and not at all difficult
for reasonably fit walkers. Our route covered eighty five miles in six day. Even though it is a reasonably well marked national route there were quite a
few occasions when our leader found his sat nav very useful, in spite
of being an experienced walker leading a group of experienced walkers.

For me, the sat nav has three main advantages over a paper
map.

I am able to record walks such as those organised by my
local Ramblers Association.
A large number of walks can be downloaded from a variety of internet
sources.
I know where we are when the path is unclear.

As an example of the last point, we recently found ourselves
unsure of the right path while walking in Somerset. Apparently confronted with
two paths skirting a large field of wheat, our book of local walks said to take
the right hand path. Fair enough – off we went.

However, the sat nav soon showed that we were deviating from
the OS footpath, so we retraced our steps and soon discovered a signpost to a
third path buried in the hedge. Maybe this meant the middle path was the right
hand path referred to in our guide?

Wrong again according to the sat nav.

In the end it became obvious that the OS path went straight
through the field of wheat but walkers simply skirted the field and rejoined
the official path on the other side. The sat nav showed that this was indeed
the right conclusion.

Okay – it would have been easy enough to work this out with
a paper map, but the sat nav showed us we were going wrong after about fifty
feet or so – no messing about looking for landmarks and no need to dig out the
compass. Once we’d reached to other side of the wheat field, it also confirmed
that we were back on the right path.

Even so, I don’t use the thing without a paper map unless
the walk is one I’m familiar with, but the sat nav comes out far more often
than the paper map these days.

An additional benefit is that it records miles walked,
average speed, time spent actually walking and total ascents.

The last one is a little misleading, because a recorded total
ascent of say 2000 feet does not necessarily imply a stiff climb or two.
Instead it is the sum total of all the undulations of the whole walk which may
have been somewhat less strenuous than a figure of 2000 feet appears to
suggest.

In the end, the gadget is a digital map, a GPS system, a
route recording system and access to a library of walks on the internet – all neatly
packaged in one device. It makes walking life easier and I think a little more
enjoyable.

Will these gadgets get more people walking though? Maybe – they do work rather well.

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Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Source: http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2013/08/walking-with-sat-nav.html

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