But I digress from the original post ... after a lot of swearing, I gave all the tutorials some study and discovered my errors with the program. First, the app must be downloaded successfully. Later, it must be synced with the map on your pc regularly. The big thing with my product is that there are two capabilities of the software -- first, to download a topo map, one you have marked up and adjusted on your pc. Second, to actually link to your online map when you have a data signal -- this takes a lot of battery. The trick was to do my field navigation using the downloaded map, which uses little battery. It just plots your position on the map using the gps chip -- easy and fast. My phone acquires a gps signal faster than my Garmin did. Once I figured that out, which could have happened in a day but took a year due to my failure to read, things came together nicely.
In the field, one needs to know whether your screen is automatically orienting north or if it is simply behaving like a paper map -- you must know where north is, and know how the paper is oriented. Since my map usually has lots of topo features, and I am standing in them at the time, it is easy to see what to do.
Most recently, I was standing in a deep valley in a wilderness area wondering if I had reached a certain spring I had marked on the topo, which was downloaded. With the app, I simply looked at the dot to see if I had passed the position. Turns out the feature was not a true spring, but would have been great if it were ...
I think most apps will offer these capabilities in some form or other. But you do need to know if the app will offer a downloadable master map or if it has to tap into the 'cloud' and read a map to function. Another thing I noticed is that the smart phone commands involve a lot of touching the screen, which is difficult in the field. If you tap it too much and give too many commands, it may freeze. You have to take it easy and pace your commands to the processor speed of your phone. There may be certain scale which loads instantly, yet must resolve again if re-loaded. I 'stuck' my program a few times before I got that.
I'm going to length here because the benefit is really big -- the info you get on the phone screen, the high quality map, the gps function, and the ability to take photos, movies or send a text using one machine, is a big upside. Such a big upside that my Garmin, after it's last 'failure to acquire', acquired a 180-grain Gold Dot instead.
