Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting IPhone, and The Man In The Wilderness.

These days, I prefer to use a map with a UTM grid that I print magnified to my area of interest WITH a matching paper grid/ruler that I cover with transparent tape. With UTM, however, the coordinates are already equivalent to meters so there is no ruler/scale required when you already have a grid.

My iPhone's battery drains ridiculously fast so I am moving away from depending on it and I also do not have a separate GPS.

What I still do use is an app called "Toms Trails" that simply dumps GPS coordinates in UTM. This is as spartan as one can get to minimize battery-dependence but still provide the most basic benefit/advantage of a GPS device, placing your position definitively on a map.

Save battery time: put it in airplane mode, turn off sound & vibration AND reduce screen brightness. If you can, choose an app with black background only and mostly minimal, text-based.

Use https://mappingsupport.com to get free topo's on your desktop computer with your grid of choice and print them out. Note lack of magnetic declination on printout so you have to look that up separately: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag-web/#declination