Serious topo map suggestions

Product feedback & support
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  1. Maybe I’ve missed it…I am not seeing a way to download a topo map for offline use without laboriously dragging and zooming my way through the phone app until I (hopefully) am centered on the area I want to download. If I flip the slider for topo maps, I can pick my way down to USA=>Nevada and download the street-evel maps, and I get shown that there are 4 topo maps, numbered region 1-4. Are those 4 regions in NV, or are those four regions nationally? In either case, I am not able to download them: tapping on one gets me an error saying “could not access downloaded map. Try again later.” Of course I can’t access it–I haven’t been able to download the darned thing!

My recent use case: I live outside Portland, OR. We were going offroad-camping/hiking in the Gold Butte National Monument (southern tip of Nevada). The area has few roads, and many of them show up in GaiaGPS but not in the GoTenna app. I was (finally) able to identify a landmark near the center of the area I wanted, and downloaded that topo…which appears to be pretty small, space-wise. This was sufficiently frustrating that I was unable to do it before the trip, and certainly wasn’t able to coax my co-travellers into going through the process. Once we got where we going, this would have been fairly easy, but of course, we were offline, hence, previously loaded offline maps would have been a good thing.

Entering LAT/LONG into the search window works okay…it responds with the name of the nearest town, but appears to center on the actual location entered. That’s viable. Would still like to know how I am supposed to down these “regions”, and whether they’re wintin a state, nation, world, etc.

  1. it’d sure be a nice thing if the map showed a scale (even if it’s in metric), and it’d be lovely if a tap on the map came back with LAT/LONG for the spot tapped, which could then be captured to the clipboard and used for whatever…sent in a message, saved to a text file, etc. I know a long-press prompts to create a pin, which then has the LAT/LONG info. I know I can then share it via a GoTenna message. It’d be a lot nicer if the long press that brings up the “create pin” dialog showed the LAT/LONG as part of the prompt, and that could be captured, rather than creating a pin just to get a location and then deleting it.

I don’t expect the interface to be as robust as Google Earth. I know you’re somewhat limited by the map backend you’re using, But I don’t think the changes in #2 are anything but simple GUI improvements.

WRT #1: how am I supposed to fetch these offline topo map “regions”?

–Richard

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As is often the case, ask a question, get crickets back as response, especially from the GoTenna Product Manager, who is supposedly listening.

A light is slowing coming on WRT the boneheaded “My Maps” interface. Those four regions are the four topos I apparently loaded previously for offline use. They only get useful names if you use the My Maps GUI to change them, so unless you’re very diligent about renaming them or keeping track of the order you fetch them in, all you can really do from that interface is delete them.

There are exactly four slots, and the GUI, once I cleaned things up, says (3/4), as though I can have at most 4. Before cleanup, it said (6/4). I just added a fourth. I can tap on any of those four and the downloaded region gets centered in the map display. That’s nice. And now when I try to download a fifth, I get an error saying that the maximum number of downloaded maos has been hit, and to delete another if I want to add this one.

Really? Four? This seems like a ridiculously low limit. My four “regions” take up a whopping 75MB of space. For the recent camping trip, I would have been offline in at least six distinct areas where offline topos would have been useful. It seems like this limit should be up to the user to set, based on either map-count or memory used. Many have touted this offline topo thing as being one of the big advantages of going Plus, but it’s four max stored at any given time, that’s a joke.

Why does this limit even exist?

(This would be a good spot for a “listening” product manager to chime in with real answers)

–Richard