Not at all. I find My Tracks is useful to record my cycling as well. I also have CoPilot Live which downloads maps onto my Galaxy S3. Unfortunately it doesn't have trails in the system. Google Maps is useful for planning routes.

Well then, I actually now use Runtastic: Road Bike app for recording my ride, though the GPS doesn't seem as accurate as my cheap $20 cycle computer. Googlemaps gives me exactly 6 miles to the other side of the tunnel on the rails to trails I ride which matches the bike computer and Runtastic gives me only 5.5 miles. Then again, I guess the GPS doesn't work real well in the tunnel. Also the bike computer calculates time and average speed riding where Runtastic calculates any stopped time as well so the elapsed time and average speed is wrong from actual riding. I think My Tracks will actually give you moving time/average and overall time/average.

Son of a gun...these guys are right. Took my unactivated [only activate it when I go to events] android phone on ride this morn, and sure 'nuf, the maps gps worked fine. Thanks guys; didn't know that. Still might activate it for events though for phone service just in case I need a SAG or something. Wow...I wonder how cave men got around on their bikes? Think we are getting spoiled or something? Has anyone come up with how to hook up TV to a bike bar yet? Could watch my favorite soaps during those long flats that have no end, ha.

That's easy. Activate phone with data and get the app for either Directv or Dish Network and you can stream any currently playing program on any channel you subscribe to or any recording you have on your DVR

Most modern smart phones do not download maps as they go...the information is stored on the device. The phone itself gets GPS location through triangulating through multiple terrestrial towers...it's not using data. You have to keep in mind that a lot of today's phones have huge amounts of storage. I have road maps for the entire US, Canada, Central/South America, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and most of Asia. Whole thing only uses a couple of Gigabytes of storage...on a phone that totals over 50 GB with internal drive and removable SD card.

What I do with my Garmin GPS units is download each bike ride, save as gpx file. Then merge the file with all my other rides of the year, which makes one neat spider graph of every road I've ridden for the year.



That's using Delorme Topo software. I would love to find an online site that would do this.

I'd like to do that to identify the roads I haven't ridden. I think it may be possible in Garmin's BaseCamp, but I find it way too much of a chore to use.

The gist of your post is correct: You can use many smart phones as a GPS navigation device for bicycle without using any cellular data, but some details aren't quite right.

Most modern smart phones can store maps on the phone, but this is not the default behavior for Google maps (or Apple Maps) as far as I know.

GPS is not from terrestrial towers, but satellites. But you are correct that it doesn't use cell data. And no smart phones have "internal drives", but do have flash memory and some have removable SD cards.

That's pretty cool. Do you just merge the files by hand or do you use software to do it?

I did something similar with My Tracks. It wasn't biking, but for S&G's I opened the My Tracks app every time we walked on the beach or every time we left the hotel to go to dinner or whatever. Then I uploaded the maps to Google Maps and my week's worth of Myrtle Beach was all on one map. It was neat to see that every time we walked on the beach, because of the kids we didn't go very far, but there was a lot of running around in circles as we looked for shark teeth.

As a further clarification, the Osmand GPS Android app recommended earlier in this thread is one of those that stores maps on the phone. So if anyone's trying to use that with their inactive Android phone, they'll need to download map data via a wifi connection.
Yeah, that's my understanding as well. Signals from cell towers are not how position is determined by the GPS-capable cell phones, but rather the phone calculates position based on signals received directly from GPS satellites.

Your map looks very similar to the ones I created over the years using Garmin's software. It's a feature you really can't do using a dedicated unit from Garmin made for cars.

The open source, free My Tourbook can do this by selecting a range of rides from it's history list. It draws all of them on a zoomable map. They can be color coded, in this case by speed--see the legend at the left side.

I uploaded my Garmin Edge .tcx files to it.

This is a zoom in showing two years of rides. The hills are either 35+ mph (red) or 5 mph (blue) depending on which direction was most recent.

I just use software to keep adding gpx files of my rides as I save them daily. Garmin's free BaseCamp software will do that also and you can use free maps from OpenStreetMap. I use Topo 6.0, which is quite dated but around here they simply don't build any new roads but with new Delorme Topo costing $100, that's too much money for me.

And thanks to rm -rf, I am going to look into that software also.

I first read that as: 'Since I used delete everything without asking, I need new software.'

It took me a while to read it as 'Since fellow forum member 'rm -rf' suggested that software, I'm going to look into it.' as you probably intended.

That's funny. (For Windows users, 'rm -rf' is the linux command to delete every file, including nested 'folders'. And it never asks 'Are you sure?')

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My Tourbook takes a little work to configure, since it has so many options. It runs on my local PC, no internet needed. I have it saving map tiles, so it only needs to download sections of the map one time. I overlaid the map with a 3-D shading.

Here's my normal display.

The top left is rides subtotaled by month and year. Each ride include distance, riding time and stopped time, average and max for speed, heartrate, etc, and a short description of the ride.

The top right is the zoomable map. I can make it full screen, too.

The bottom is selected graphs of the current ride. Green is elevation, Red is heartrate, Blue is speed.



If I zoom in far enough, I see each 1-second position dot from the .tcx data. Red is fastest, so the dots are farther apart.

Phones can do this but you have to download the maps expliciitly (and each mapping app has its own method for doing that). Most mapping programs will store small amounts (cache) of map data but most of them (including the standard ones) get map data as needed.

"GPS" is using GPS satellites: it works even when there are no cell towers.

Cell phones can also get positioning data from cell towers and wifi hot spots to "assist" the GPS positioning signal. GPS is more accurate but it can take a while to get the position at first (after being turned-on). The phones can also use this other positioning data when GPS is unavailable (like indoors). You'll see this technique listed as "assisted GPS" or "aGPS".

Yes, they "can" do this.

It's not the default behavior for most apps (including the "standard" mapping programs). It appears that most of the apps require you to explicitly download the maps.

The apps provided by Garmin/TomTom/Sklobber/others might load the maps as part of their installation process. But don't assume all or most of them do!

If you are getting maps by "magic", it's probably downloading them as needed (you can test it by turning off cell/wifi access). It's not really possible to know how every app works but, if loaded maps are a feature that is important to you, you want to do some investigating to be sure how it works.

Cycling computers measure distance by counting wheel rotations and multiplying that count by the wheel circumference.

If you are using the correct/actual wheel measurement, the cycling computer (regardless of cost) will generally be more accurate than GPS.

The GPS isn't precise enough to measure all the "weaving" that you do. And it only works when it can get a signal. If you are moving in a straight line, signal loss won't matter but, if you are on a curve, the GPS will "cut the corner" and show a shorter distance than actual.

That's pretty slick. It's usable without any configuration.