NWPA22
Active Member
I always carry a compass but wanted to see how a GPS app for my cell phone would do. My brother and I did a kind of comparison, he bought onX's premium membership and I bought GAIA's Premium service. onX worked fine and did all he needed it to do for hunting and scouting. He did find some functions in onX to be a little clunky and he had to search around at times to figure out how to do what he wanted. This is what I thought of GAIA
GAIA is a downloadable GPS app that you can use on your cell phone, there is a free version, but I got the paid/premium version so that I had access to the map with property boundaries. Premium for GAIA is $40 for a year, which was cheaper than some of the other apps I looked at. They have all of the maps you would expect, State forest boundaries, Gamelands boundaries, Topo, Aerial, and combo maps, some are only available with paid membership.
Some other GPS apps are just way too busy for me, GAIA's application front end does not have all the bells and whistles that onX has, and that is why I love it! The app itself is super user friendly, there are not a bunch of different features to scroll through to get where you want, one click and you are there. It does everything that I want it to do, I can create a track to see where I walked, drop pins when I would like and I can download maps to use in offline mode, and it keeps track of me! When you download a map in GAIA you can size/select the map area you want downloaded, some other apps you have to take a pre set distance as the download radius. With GAIA I can drag the box and size it over exactly what part of the map I need, this saves space and decreases download time. Then if I am in an area with no cell service I can put my phone in airplane mode, which also saves battery, and my phone uses the downloaded maps and satellites to locate me. The main screen can be configured to what you need, I have mine setup to show above the map my elevation and course/direction of travel. I can layer maps so that I can see property boundaries over a topo or over an aerial. When layering maps you can adjust the visibility of one or all. That way if you put an aerial over a topo you can adjust how visible the aerial is.
I can also do my aerial and topo map scouting on my computer at home in their web app. I get on my computer login to the website and from there I can compare maps and put pins in places I want to scout. That info then updates to my phone and vice versa. I can see what I did on my phone that day in the web version, that allows me to see big picture where I was and what I saw. I found GAIA to be very accurate both in locating and tracking me and in getting me back to a pin.
With a lot of my hunting gear I don't care about extras, I just want something that works and that is easy, GAIA is both.
GAIA is a downloadable GPS app that you can use on your cell phone, there is a free version, but I got the paid/premium version so that I had access to the map with property boundaries. Premium for GAIA is $40 for a year, which was cheaper than some of the other apps I looked at. They have all of the maps you would expect, State forest boundaries, Gamelands boundaries, Topo, Aerial, and combo maps, some are only available with paid membership.
Some other GPS apps are just way too busy for me, GAIA's application front end does not have all the bells and whistles that onX has, and that is why I love it! The app itself is super user friendly, there are not a bunch of different features to scroll through to get where you want, one click and you are there. It does everything that I want it to do, I can create a track to see where I walked, drop pins when I would like and I can download maps to use in offline mode, and it keeps track of me! When you download a map in GAIA you can size/select the map area you want downloaded, some other apps you have to take a pre set distance as the download radius. With GAIA I can drag the box and size it over exactly what part of the map I need, this saves space and decreases download time. Then if I am in an area with no cell service I can put my phone in airplane mode, which also saves battery, and my phone uses the downloaded maps and satellites to locate me. The main screen can be configured to what you need, I have mine setup to show above the map my elevation and course/direction of travel. I can layer maps so that I can see property boundaries over a topo or over an aerial. When layering maps you can adjust the visibility of one or all. That way if you put an aerial over a topo you can adjust how visible the aerial is.
I can also do my aerial and topo map scouting on my computer at home in their web app. I get on my computer login to the website and from there I can compare maps and put pins in places I want to scout. That info then updates to my phone and vice versa. I can see what I did on my phone that day in the web version, that allows me to see big picture where I was and what I saw. I found GAIA to be very accurate both in locating and tracking me and in getting me back to a pin.
With a lot of my hunting gear I don't care about extras, I just want something that works and that is easy, GAIA is both.
