A couple of tips for bike touring navigation

These are instructions on how to take a google map and get it into a GPX file for use for offline navigation using OSMAND+ on an Android Phone.

  1. Go to Google Maps and get directions (choosing the biking option) between two points.
  2. Pull the route around finding the smallest roads you can!
  3. Click through to the “details” page for the route and copy the URL
  4. Paste the url into gpsvisualizer choosing “gpx” as the output.
  5. Save the GPX into your Dropbox account (this is just to get the file onto your phone, there are lots of ways to do this, but Dropbox is the easiest)
  6. If you have an Android phone, install OSMAND+, if you’re on iOS use “maps.me”
  7. Go into Dropbox on your phone, and find the gpx file, click on it, and choose to save it as a track
  8. Then open up OSMAND and go into “Configure Map” -> “GPX track…”, then find your gpx track
  9. Finally just click on the navigation button and it should prompt you for “Do you want to use the displayed map for navigation?” after that you’ll have offline directions on your chosen route – perfect.
  10. Specifically for the UK – the Sustrans website was handy. It shows bike routes around the UK. For the life of me I couldn’t see how to export a GPX of the route we did (route 4) eventually finding a sort-of export someone made from all the OpenStreetMap data. A very handy file which I can’t seem to find any more … however.. waymarkedtrails.org seems to allow you to download some of them. Note however that sometimes route 4 splits in two.. so I’m not sure how that works on a GPX.

Do you have tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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