• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

GPS Method Question

Clete

Clete

Husqvarna
AA Class
Never used a GPS for off-road before. I have a Garmin HCX Vista. Been toying around with a bit, and was just curious how others use theirs. This is probably a little old school already, but that's what I have. My plan was to mark the spot where I park the truck as one of the Waypoints, and then mark other locations as Waypoints throughout the day. Then use the Waypoints as a form of navigating to and from, or at least know I'm in the near vicinity to a Waypoint.

Last night I started messing with the Track function, will have to spend a little more time with that function.

Are there any preferences? Pros or Cons to either method. Any suggestions?
 
I have no idea of what features your GPS has. But most GPS devices can save a track while you ride. Essentially, it saves the exact location of where you are every few seconds. You can then download that and share it with others or use it as a guide on future rides. The same goes with tracks that others make.

Waypoints can be used in many ways, but conceptually they are landmarks. If you want to plan a route using waypoints, make sure you use a good number of waypoints so that you will be travel exactly where you want to go when getting to each waypoint... or at least fairly close to what you had in mind. You can be more casual and just use key waypoints as guides and ride in a more free form manner. You may wander around a bit more and spend more time getting to each way point that way, though, so be aware.

I'm no expert on GPS use or anything, but I've been using one for road trips (pavement) for several years. The same tools work for off road, but it's not likely you can auto-route a trip easily off road like you can hitting the pavement in the Sierras for example.

There are some good threads on GPS use on advrider.com. There are GPS routes for the Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route available, too at http://www.backcountrydiscoveryroutes.com/ There are also GPS routes for Washington's Backcountry Discovery Route and there should be for Utah soon.
 
Sounds like you are on the right path. Tracking draws a line where you go and way points are just points, you want to use them both. Also GPS can be used to find stuff or look at your ride afterward. I like downloading the GPX file off my GPS after a ride and looking at it on Google earth. I also use it for exploring via base maps and searching out areas. The more you work with them the more it all makes sense.
 
This site is pretty good. Sign up for a free account and use the App if you have any of the supported devices, like and iPad, iPhone or Android

http://www.backpacker.com/backpacker-magazine-apps/skills/15252

I wanted to use it to find a trail I knew existed but was not always well marked in real life. It lead to a town overlook. Looking at a good Topo map I just selected the turns as waypoints so I wouldn't get lost or make wrong turns and end up on the rabbit trails. With a little reading you can get the hang of importing waypoints into your GPS. Then it's like you have a roll map but don't have to really keep track of tenths of a mile....just matching waypoints to GPS positions.
 
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