Offline Wilderness Maps by @cahlen on 3Speak
OsmAnd is by far the best offline map app that's free, open source and doesn't spy on you. Here are the basic features you'll likely want to use and how to access them. --- DONATE: CONTACT: SUBSCRI...
Tags: #technology #freedom #travel #android #survival #camping #hiking #backpacking #life
Everybody, Callan here, and in this video, I'm going to talk to you about how to get an offline map of wherever you're trying to go onto your phone so that when you go out into the wilderness, you're going to have it with you, even if you don't have an internet connection, okay? So the first important part to have, if you're going to do that, is a solar panel, which you can carry in your backpack, which I talked about in the last video, okay? So you can keep your device up and running. All you're going to need is the sun. I also recommend having two devices if you're going to be doing this long turn and you're really dependent on this map so that if something happens to one phone, you drop it, the battery dies, something like that, you still have the other one to use. Okay, so there's lots of map apps out there that you can get. A lot of the good ones are not free, or they require that you have the Google Play Store or that you're on an Apple phone or something like that, which means that you're being spied on constantly, okay? So I don't want to have to pay, I don't want to be spied on, and I want my apps to be open source, which means that the code can be looked at and verified that it's not doing anything nefarious. And the best app that I am aware of, which I have been using for many years and actually made a few videos about already, is Osmand, okay? So, Osmand is free, open source, and you download the maps, depending on what area, you pick the area, and you download the various different maps, and we'll go into all the different options that you have there. It can track you on GPS, you can put little markers down that... Basically, like if you found food here, like there's fish here or there's berries here, you can make little markers and you can put them in all different types of categories. And lately, one of the downsides of Osman in the past is that you wouldn't, it didn't show you where public land was, like National Forest and BLM and all these types of things. And there has been a recent update to the app, which basically added that feature. So if you live in the United States, this is going to be extremely valuable to you now, because you can stay for two weeks in any of those locations without having to move. Every two weeks you're supposed to move about 20 miles. It depends on what location you're in. But... If you know where all these places are, then you know where you're legally allowed to stay, and if people are, you know, giving you trouble like you're not supposed to be here, you can just show them the map. This says, I'm in, you know, the allowed area. And also, this new update adds all kinds of different trails. And in some states, it will even show you property lines, private property lines, so you know where not to go, because sometimes... Property property is in the middle of public land, and so you have to know not to cross that. And also, in some states like Wyoming, they'll even tell you the name of the person that property is registered to. Okay, so it's pretty advanced. Okay, so I've got Osman running on this phone right here. I'll show you a little more. I'm actually going to do a screen record on my phone and give you a tour. of the app, but if you're using a d-gagulled phone, you probably have the F -Droid store, so that's going to be the easiest way to download Osmand. Or you could just search online for Osmand, and I'm sure it's going to give you plenty of options for where to download it. Okay, so here is the basic map without really very many features turned on. I'm going to be looking at Southern Wyoming here. We see we've got some national forests, we've got some of the main roads, we've got rivers. And the way to get to this point, because when you first download the app, you're not going to have this. You're going to need to go to maps and resources. Then you're going to go to your area. And to your state. and you'll need to click download for standard map. You might want to get contour lines, I usually do, so you can turn that on. And I like to get Wikipedia as well, which we'll talk about. Okay, so what we downloaded is basically what we're looking at here, okay? We can turn on, like going to configure map, you can turn on the Wikipedia things, which we'll just take a look at. So this can help you find interesting places. So we'll just click on this one here. It's talking about a historic bridge, okay? Something you might want to check out. So this is just an example, a good way to find interesting places to explore. Okay, so the next thing you're going to want to know is how to actually put markers on things that you've found. So you'll need to go to configure map again. Turn on favorites here. And then you just click and hold. and you click add here on the star, and you can name it. You can start little groups here, so it will automatically give it an icon and a color. So let's just say we got a camp here, save it, and it's automatically using that little campfire icon that I selected. Okay, so that's something that will be saved permanently to my phone, which I can also export and import to another phone, or send to a friend. Okay, so next very basic feature would just be getting directions. So on the bottom left here, we see that little arrow icon. We'll click on that. You can choose car, bike, on foot. And for From, I'm just going to choose Select on Map. And you see that little green flag. Just set it where I want, and I'll select it. And then Destination, I'll just do the same thing, select on map. We could have chose our favorite. or we could have put in an address or something like that and we'll see we're getting directly to click start now it doesn't know where we are because my location is off at the moment but if it did it would tell us what to do next okay next would be how to get some point of interest like if you're looking for a grocery store or gas station you go to configured maps turn on point of interest, I'm going to go to feeling station, okay? Now we can see all these different places where we can get gas. You can do that with basically everything that was in this list here, which is quite a few things. Okay, next we're going to show you some features which require that you turn on some plugins, okay? So you're going to need to go into the menu, go to the bottom, click on plugins. Orange ones are the ones I have on, okay, so turn on Wikipedia, online maps, trip recording, you can do topography if you want, you're looking for topographic maps, and then also the EXT, U.S. Lans, and Trails. So just turn all those on. I think when you click the EXT, U .S. Lans, and Trails, it's going to take you to another screen where you have to confirm that you want to install this plugin. Okay, so next let's talk about the plugin, the recording. So in the upper right, you see the little REC, the recording. You click that, you can click how often you want it to record your GPS location, and you click start. Okay. And basically, it will track where you're walking, and when you're done, you can click finish. and if I had actually recorded something, then it would let me save it and name it and all this type of stuff, okay? So let's actually show you what a track looks like. So we're going to go to configure map. I'm going to scroll down. We're going to turn on tracks, okay? And here's a bunch of tracks. Okay, let's do the tour divide, okay? That's the mountain biking trail that goes all the way from Mexico. to Canada, okay? So here's that trail, the red line. You can see it goes all the way up, basically into Yellowstone. Okay, so someone used a recording feature to make this track. So that's the kind of thing. You can basically make as many of these as you want, just like your favorites. You can save them and share them with your friends. So right now, we're using something called the offline vector map, which is what we downloaded. But if you want to use other types of maps, you would scroll down, go to Map Source, and you click Add More down here. And because we turned on the online maps, we're going to have all these options, okay? So there's all kinds of different things. You can use, some of them are country -specific. Okay, but like this one... Might be nice, USA Topo Maps. Let's see what this one looks like. Okay? So this is like what you would get if you went in and bought paper maps from the USGS, okay? This is going to tell you where mines are, where mountains are, what their elevation is, what the topography is. Now, the downside of online maps is that in order to download them, you have to be actively looking at them. You can't just download them ahead of time. which means that when you're out in the wilderness and you don't have internet connection, you won't have access unless you already looked at it earlier. So you need to know where you're going and go, make sure you look at that place with that map turned on. So you look, there's springs, and scroll through, and also at the different zoom levels, okay, because those are downloaded separately. Okay? So let's switch it back to offline vector because I always keep this as my base, okay? Now, if you want to have an overlay, which I highly recommend, you turn this on, I like Microsoft Earth because this is basically satellite, okay? So you see this little bar at the bottom, middle. If I scroll it over, now I'm looking at satellite. Again, this is an online map, so you'll need to look at the area that you are going to be offline in later ahead of time. But you can see it's pretty good, right? You can see very specifically, and you can get a mix here. so you can have a mix of the offline and the online map. Okay, so if you want to look at the contour lines, it's again, in configure map, scroll down, just turn it on here. You can see now we've got all the elevation lines, which can be very helpful. Okay, so last I'm going to show you the new feature, which we turned on in the plugins earlier. Oh, it's at the top here. Okay, extra maps, U.S. lands and trails data, okay, just click on that. Scroll down here. Public lands, you're going to need to download this one specific to your state. And I've already downloaded the Wyoming one. And private lands, I downloaded the Wyoming one, too. So this will show you private property. U.S. Forest Service, so it's going to show you... basically areas, like camping areas, it'll show you all the roads of the US, United States Forest Service, and all the trails, okay? So you will download all three of those, and the BLM, Bureau of Land Management, same thing, okay? So just download all these, and then you're going to have to turn it on, okay, so you go to configure map, you'll scroll down all the way to the bottom, public lands display mode, and I like to do by manager name, okay? So now, oops, there's the satellite, now we can see all of the public land in Wyoming, okay? So the green is the National Forest, the brownish yellow, that's BLM, okay, so there's a lot of BLM. So all of this area, this dark green, and all of this yellow, that's all land that you can stay on for two weeks at a time, then you have to move roughly 20 miles. And then I think this lighter green must be, or maybe it's this color, must be National Park. And there's different rules about national parks. So here's Yellowstone, right? You might have to pay to get in, I'm not sure. But you can't necessarily camp there in the same way that you would on National Forest. Okay. So let's look at private land here. There's other colors, too. You see this blue. I think this is... Bureau of Reclamation, USBR, usually that has to do with waterways, the purple. I don't actually know what all the other colors are because I don't really need to know. Then these orange lines are showing you the private properties, so we're going to zoom in, and look, in Wyoming we can actually see who owns the various properties, which is pretty cool. Okay, and last, let's just check out some of the roads. Let's go down to the National Forest here. Zoom in. Oops, I always accidentally turn on that bar there. You see, so we got National Forest here, but look, there's a bunch of private property right in the middle of it, but it's all shaded green, so we wouldn't have known that we can't camp in this spot. well, we probably would have known because there'd be houses, which, by the way, we could look at with satellite and say, oh, yeah, there's definitely houses, so I wouldn't want to camp there, okay? But anyways, we can see, there's all these roads, you can see that there's a creek here. So if we turn on, if we're looking for a good camp spot, you know, we're like, okay, here's a creek, here's a road that goes through the National Forest. Turn on our satellite. Looks like I could pull off over here, right? Oops. Looks like I can pull off over here. It might be a good camp spot, okay? So this is one of the main ways you can use this when you're living outside as a nomad. So that's the basics. There's lots of other features, you know, you know, all this other stuff, all these other plugins. Configure Maps has lots of other things you can look into. Okay, but basically what I've shown you is the basics of what you want to know. So that's the tour of Osmand. I'd say really the only downside to Osmand at this point is it doesn't do very well with addresses. So if someone gives you an address to their home, it may not be able to find it, right? Because it doesn't have a database of all addresses in the entire world, and it doesn't have internet access to go and check that, okay? So if you're trying to get to a place, it would be better if you actually got the coordinates of that place, because it'll be able to figure that out, you know, down to, you know, probably a couple meters. So if you're going to be spending a lot of time outdoors, or you just want to use a map app, which is free, not spying on you, and is open source so that you can verify that that's the case, then as far as I know, Osman is by far the best option that you have available. I have been using it for years, and now that with this recent update, it's basically everything that I could ever want, okay? So anyways, if you have enjoyed this video or found it valuable, please share it. I know you hear everyone say that all the time, but I'm not on any platform that promotes my, there's no algorithms promoting my videos. I have over 1,000 videos. I've been making videos for eight years. Still, only a few hundred people see each of my videos, right? So the only way that I can overcome that, because if I were on any of the major platforms, which I'm not willing to do, They would shadow ban me anyways. The only thing that gets me out to other people is when you share it. Okay, so please do that. Anyways, thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys later.