I’m just back from 2 weeks’ hard riding/guiding in the Alpujarras region of Southern Spain. One of my new toys before I went was an HTC Desire smartphone. The Desire runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system which powers many of the new phone models trying to compete with Apple’s ubiquitous iPhone. What’s this got to do with mountain biking? Well like many smartphones, the Desire has built-in GPS, a compass, fast internet-connection and a lovely big colour touch-screen. Put all this together and you have the potential for the ultimate navigation device.
Take a look around the internet or the Android marketplace and you will find many applications for GPS tracking your walking, running or cycling activities. Some of these include Cardio Trainer, Trek Buddy, Buddy Runner, Maverick and AlpineQuest. Some of them have slightly different niches, but I settled on Google MyTracks. Using it is dead easy – click menu > record track and you”re away. If you have an internet connection available at the time, you will be able to see your position on a Google map or satellite view. If not, you”ll just see an arrow marking your position on a blank background. After you’ve completed your ride just click menu > stop recording and you’re done. Tap the screen to see icons for your ride stats or an elevation profile / speed graph – you’ll probably want to change the stats setting from the default ‘pace’ to ‘speed’ if you’re biking. You can save the recorded file in GPX or KML format to the SD card or leave it (by default) in the phone’s internal storage. If you have a Google account, one click will upload the file to your account where you can later view and share it online. Click the end point on the map to see the stats. Here’s a short example.
The Good: GPS tracking hammers your phone’s battery, so it is important to be able to configure the frequency at which your phone takes a GPS reading. MyTracks, unlike some of the other apps, makes this easy. One of the first things you should do is change this setting from the default ‘every 1 second’ to every 5 or 10, depending how long your ride is. I could run my phone for in excess of 9 hours continuously on the 10 second setting, and the results were perfectly adequate accuracy-wise. You can put your phone into Aircraft mode too if you really want to squeeze every last minute out of it. I put my phone in my Camelbak and it seemed to hold GPS reception with no problems.
The Bad: As a mountain biker you’ll often be without phone or data reception when you’re out in the wilds. In Spain there was no way I was paying data roaming charges even if I had reception. This means you’ll mostly be without a map which somewhat limits the navigational aid side of things. There are a few apps that will store maps offline, but I’m yet to find any that will work with Google satellite maps – the most useful for the region of Spain I was in. I tried using Mobile Atlas Creator to download and store offline the area I was interested in (for use with Maverick) but I couldn’t get it to work – it only seemed to want to download one map tile for each level of zoom rather than all those needed to cover the area. There are also commercial products (eg. Viewranger) for buying offline OS maps if you”re in the UK, but they’re pretty pricey. Dedicated hardware units like SatMap will also do the job.
MyTracks is now open-source. There has been one noticeable cock-up on app updates whereby the stats data was lost on upload to your Google account, so quality control and testing could obviously be improved. The app version number is out of date on the website too. However, for free it’s a smashing little application that’s very easy to use and gives useful insight into your day’s riding.
