EDIT: I will spare you from reading the below... I think OnXHunt hunting app will likely do what I want to do... create a desired trail route in an area that has spotty cell service. Apparently, I can save a map offline and still use OnXHunt in the field using the cellphone's GPS ability regardless of cell signal. = It's blood, sweat and tears, especially in summer but I do enjoy it (just don't enjoy the summer here!)... I am building trails on a 40 acre tract. Over a couple years, by hand, I've done about 90% of the one that roughly goes around the perimeter but I would rather my trail weave back and forth through the whole place so I can (hopefully) be able to monitor every square foot of its trees. It's pretty thick with underbrush in much of it, so, I can't really tell exactly where I am except for a general feel for where I am. Anyone know of a live GPS type app or a dedicated GPS device that would do this? Oh wait... hmmm... Google maps will show location. I would not have my tract boundaries showing on Google maps (like they are on the tax assessor site) but my tract borders are pretty well-defined by the type of trees I have (hardwood and surrounding tracts are pines). Problem is, I don't have good cell service out there. Partly due to lack of a nearby tower but also probably due to it's forest with tall trees. Point is, I would like to be able to blaze a trail and every 30 feet or so check my location so I know I am on the right heading for my desired trail path. Hmmm... I could go to a known trail location (I know where it is on the ground and also on a map)... and roughly eyeball on the map (say, a topographic map) what heading I need to go and for how many feet... and I could use my Android cellphone compass app to give me that heading and then I could just step it off as I build it. A challenge is I don't want it to be straight legs creating a zigzag pattern, I want to curve naturally here and there. Curves do occur naturally here and there when you come up to a tree you don't want to cut and also thick, impenetrable brush you'd rather go around. It sure would be easier if I could just look at my phone and tell where I am! Easy peasy! I do have a plot of my main trail on a satellite image of the area that I created with a hiking app. I hit "start" and walked the trail and it created an image of my hike. Any ideas on this? Sure wish I could get a live fix! EDIT: I just thought of two apps I have but haven't used in two years... Huntstand and OnXHunt. Parcel boundaries can be had on there (might be a fee). I will test these and see if 2019 versions can kind of do what I want. Hmmm... read site for Huntstand and now on OnxHunt and the latter says, "Access saved maps from anywhere and locate yourself in the wild. The GPS in your mobile device works perfectly offline, even when the network is nonexistent." So, I guess that means that even with a poor cell signal, I could see my location on the saved map?
GPS should work on a mobile device without a sim card even. Which means no network service. It might take longer to lock on and may not be "highly" accurate but it should work. I use the gps on an old windows phone I have with no network service(no sim card) and it works perfect for me. I basically used it for a speedometer on my one old truck until I replaced the cluster. It was accurate for speed (slight lag when increasing/decrease speed but good once going) so I believe it should be fine for location as well.
I use my smartphone and the APP maps.me will use downloaded maps that stay on your device for those times/places where one does not have cel or wifi data either due to location and unavailability or you have a minimal data plan. Somewhere around here I have a low end hand held Garmin GPS that you could use to make a trail of "dots" to follow your route back the way you came. The APP maplets (on my ipod which I don't use much any more) used to have a lot of unique trail maps one could download. Their maps or maplets were uploaded from quite a varying array of sources. Some quality better than others. Some of the maps were great, some zucked.
I used OnXHunt today and logged in and captured a trail. It is certainly revealing if it's correct! Anyone have any idea how accurate this should be? The app draws the parcel boundaries from the tax assessor. If the captured trail is correct, the property lines are off in a couple of spots. I wonder how accurate? Within three feet? Ten feet? 30? 50? BTW, I do know that the tax assessor boundary lines are approximate, so, there could be some error with that, alone.
On the few APPs I've tried the property lines are all to the East about ten feet. Don't know if that is the error in the town's data or georeferencing in the apps. Despite that the public gps accuracy even with the wifi and /or cel tower positioning added in is still only thirty feet although many times it is fairly well spot on.
My son works for the assessors office for a couny in South Carolina. He talks about the problems he has with inaccurate surveys, and how they have to accommodate that with current gis mapping. Not fun. And in the end still not 100% accurate. Lot lines going through buildings. Working with old colonial maps saying go from the fork in the trail to the gum tree on the hill types of things. They don't use the township range outline like later surveys do, so everything is very cut up. Plus deeds have wording errors. It's a process.
Any WAAS enabled GPS should put you within 10'. I don't know if cell phone GPS's are WAAS enabled but I would think so. If you hunt you should get a Garmin Rino GPS. If you get the hunt chip it will have a base map, landowner map, contour map and satellite overlay. Your OnXHunt should do everything you need also. There should be a feature on your device that gives estimated max position error.
Smartphones use aGPS as it makes more sense in a network environment and besides WAAS mostly corrects the vertical error in gps positioning needed to be useful in a flight environment.
You are correct that WAAS has more resolution in the Y axis (about 4 times as much) but it does correct in all three, X,Y and Z. I have watched estimated position errors go from 60 or 70 ft. to less than 10 ft. as augmentation enables on even a cheap GPS unit.
Yep. When you need to get a property properly surveyed, you see why many people avoided updating their maps...$$$$. I’ve invested (how I rationalize it) money to get updated pdf maps of my lands. People who own this land in the future will hopefully avoid the “ten links to the big ash tree” way of mapping.
Know what you mean about the "Big Ash tree"! One corner of our original plot was listed as a "Stone Monument". It was a half buried rock about 3' across. A later survey drilled into the rock and epoxied a proper survey marker into it. Makes it tough for a fence corner when it lands on a rock!
Our old house had a property line that was a town line as well. On the other side it was also National Park land, our line was just a couple hundred feet of a straight line that went several miles. The anchor on one end was a survey marker on a rock on a beach, the other was the center of a bridge over a creek, it was written that way many moons ago. Well rocks on beaches move, and the bridge was replaced at least twice over the years. Things came to a head after we bought and it turned into a big fight with the Park Service with a bunch of the land owners who had that line as a boundary...guess who won? We ended up loosing a couple tenths of an acre, others lost much more, I really didn't care as its Park land anyway and nothing is ever going to happen to that.
