A summer vacation doesn’t have to mean just lounging by the pool. If you’re eager to explore the mountains on a bike, go hiking along the ridges, and pick up a geocache or two along the way, we have good news for you: you can plan your entire active vacation in a single app.

One app for your entire vacation

Imagine a typical active vacation: a few days cycling along a river, interspersed with a challenging hike in the mountains, and the occasional geocache to spice things up. Until recently, that meant juggling several websites, paper maps, and notes on your phone. With Locus Map, you can handle everything in one place.

You can plan your trip at your leisure at home on your computer, send the planned routes to everyone in your group, and then Locus will reliably guide you on your phone—even in places where there’s no signal. Let’s go through how to do it step by step.

Map selection – biking and hiking maps

A good map is the foundation of every trip. And this is where Locus Map has one of its biggest advantages—it offers a wide selection of map data, so you can choose the one that best suits your plans.

At the heart of the app are LoMaps—our own maps based on data from OpenStreetMap. They include marked hiking and biking trails, terrain shading, and contour lines, so you can see at a glance where a steep climb awaits you. They work great offline, and we update them regularly.

If you’re planning a trip around Europe, you’ll also find specialized online resources helpful. You’ll find the right ones for every activity and region—for example, detailed IGN maps in France, Outdooractive in German-speaking countries, or Swisstopo in Switzerland. 

Tip: Before you set out, download an offline map of the entire region. With Premium Gold, you can download all LoMaps offline for free, so you won't be caught off guard by a loss of signal in the mountains.

Route planning – from the comfort of your home

Locus Map for Android offers the most advanced route planner, but it’s closely followed by the web planner at web.locusmap.app—which now also lets you edit waypoints, their icons, and labels, and displays them on the map. Planning on a large computer screen simply has its own charm: you can comfortably put together a multi-stage route, add any number of waypoints, and select the appropriate LoRouter profile (bike, walking, and more) for each activity. You can also fine-tune the route calculation parameters for each profile exactly to your liking.

And the best part is that the online LoRouter is free. It’s more than enough to help you plan your vacation from the comfort of your own home. You’ll really appreciate the paid offline LoRouter (Gold) when you’re out in the field with no signal.

If you're not an expert at fine-tuning routing profiles or dealing with complex waypoints, you can easily plan your route in Locus Map Lite on your iPhone or iPad—you'll find a simplified route planner there as well.

All set? Share your route with the whole group

When you’re heading out on vacation with a group, not everyone has to plan the route from scratch. You can simply share the route via a link (URL)—send it to a group chat, and every member of the group can open it on their device with a single click—even those who don’t have Locus Map. The route will open in their web browser. That way, everyone has exactly the same itinerary on their phone, and no one will get lost along the way.

A place to stay straight from the map

Planning your route is one thing, but where will you lay your head each night? Locus Map can help with that, too. For all points of interest (POIs) in the “Accommodations” category, you’ll find a Booking.com button that will redirect you to this popular accommodation portal.

How does it work? The link does not open a specific accommodation listing directly, but launches the Booking.com website or app and enters the name of the POI into the search bar. All you have to do is check availability and prices, then make a reservation.

Geocaching along the way

Geocaching is the perfect way to spice up an active vacation. Locus Map is an official partner of Geocaching.com, so it offers plenty of useful tools for geocachers. You can easily search for caches along your route, download them, let the app navigate you to them, and log your finds both online and offline. Support for waypoints and Pocket Queries is, of course, included.

Think of geocaching as a fun way to spice up your trip—a few caches along the way to the summit or at a rest stop will bring joy and give you the motivation to pedal on, especially for kids.

Offline in the field

Once everything is planned and shared, there’s just one last step: preparing the app for a trip without a signal. Download offline maps, routing data, and planned routes in advance, and Locus Map will guide you seamlessly through even the most remote corners of the countryside. This is where the offline LoRouter from the Premium Gold package comes in handy, as it recalculates your route even without a connection.

Voice-guided navigation along the route is a given, so you don’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket. When cycling with your phone mounted on the handlebars, it’s also handy that the screen turns on automatically at turns so you don’t miss any. Discovering new hidden paths can be an adventure, but you definitely don’t want to end up somewhere in the nettles and swamps—especially with small children. 

While you're out riding, turn on track recording with real-time statistics on speed, elevation, and distance traveled, so you'll have a keepsake of your adventures. And don't forget to take photos! Locus Map can display your photos over the map or in the track details of your trips.

Set out on your active vacation

From the initial inspiration, through route planning and booking accommodations, to navigation on the trail—Locus Map will guide you through your entire active vacation. So what are you waiting for? Open the web planner, plan your next trip by bike or on foot, and set out to explore. Adventures await.

Článek Active Vacations with Locus Map: Biking, Hiking, and Geocaching se nejdříve objevil na Locus Map - mobile outdoor navigation app.

Locus Map offers a wide range of settings for navigation or guidance in terrain or along roads. Ordinary navigation, for example in a car or on a bike, is absolutely without problems, just listen to navigation commands and check the display ocassionally. However, if you need only the voice commands for the navigation it's necessary to make some adjustments. These are useful for activities when your hands are occupated or you don't have the phone just in front of your eyes - nordic skiing, nordic walking, running... That's why I tried to find the most convenient solution how to set it up.

First thing, you have to check your TTS (text-to-speech) settings (Menu > Settings > Language and Units > TTS settings). There's no problem with major languages like English, German or French. Some minor languages must seek help from extra apps like e.g. Vocalizer TTS.

Second thing that you'll need is routing service for calculating routes. If you don't want to be online all the time, try GraphHopper or even better BRouter. Personally I prefer BRouter. Not only it works with better updated data but also it offers more route calculating profiles. It often offers "wet" and "dry" variant that might come very handy when running or hiking.

Thirdly, you have to make clear what you expect from the journey and decide according to it if to choose navigation or guidance along a route. Voice commands at direction changes work in both cases but guidance doesn't recalculate the route. Instead, Locus notifies of the distance and direction of the nearest routepoint. That might seem to be a disadvantage but in free terrain it can be actually pretty useful. "Outdoors" we may easily get to places where the navigation doesn't know any roads and then it won't recalculate the route. Locus, however, offers option to enable automatic switch from navigation to guidance.

If you travel through a city to a particular target use turn-by-turn navigation with route recalculation. Tap Navigate to, define your target, check Compute instructions. In this case Locus automatically recalculates your route if you leave your original one.

Locus settings

Menu/Settings/Display

• I recommend switching all automatic display switch-ons off so that the phone screen won't turn on uselessly in your pocket.
• Then check Disable screen lock checkbox. You might need to check the screen and you don't have to put your gloves off to unlock your phone, just switch it on with the HW button. All the same, I recommend to tap Hold map center button in lower left corner.

Navigation

should be set up as follows:

• Source: BRouter (or GraphHoppher)
• Auto-recalculation: route priority or point priority depending on what you think matters - the route you're walking along or the target you want to get to.
• Distance for recalculation: 200 m
• Out of route notification: ON. After unfolding the menu set the distance to 100 m and TTS for the sound.
• Advanced settings: Strict route following OFF.  Maximum allowed deviation: 2 km (if you want navigation to switch automatically into guidance, set some lower value depending on the terrain character). Snap to route OFF. Number of commands Medium and Two commands at once ON.

Guidance settings

• Notification ON, notification type TTS.
• Set next trackpoint: 60 m
• Set notification of the next direction change: ON and TTS.
• Out of route notification: ON. Alert distance 70 m and Repeat notification every 30 seconds. Sound settings again Text-to-speech.
• Advanced settings: I recommend to switch Strict route following OFF and switch Notify on every trackpoint ON.

GPS settings

Here I recommend to switch on two notifications: Position acquired and Position lost. Set different sound to each of them to recognize easily the GPS status. Then, uncheck Track recording which is useful when you use Locus for recording your tracks and make a break for a snack in a pub. Just pause the recording and GPS goes off automatically. If you leave the feature on Locus will beep when you lose your GPS signal.

I'm sure all these settings aren't ideal for all activities. Also, the app can't create navigation settings profiles yet which can be worked around by making several settings backups and naming them "bike", "hike" etc. After launching Locus just restore one of the backups and Locus is set up as you need. It's not perfect solution but it works. And I believe one time Locus will provide navigation settings profiles.

And that's sort of all I wanted to tell you about the voice-only navigation in Locus. Thank you all who made it all through the article and wish you a lot of nice kilometers hiked with Locus in your earphones.

Josef Žajdlík

photo author and Emma Bishop

Článek Tip for the weekend: voice-only navigation se nejdříve objevil na Locus Map - mobile outdoor navigation app.

In the middle of the summer we set off to a Locus testing trip to the Austrian Alps and by the way we had a nice motorbike ride along their curvy mountain roads. Or was it the other way round? ;)

As decent motorbikers we had to boost our equipment before the journey so a robust quality phone mount was the number one on our specs list. We've tried many cycling phone mounts with plastic foam side holders (a cheaper version) but after the experience we recommend to spend a few more bucks on the RAM mount that can be seen on the photo. It holds the phone firmly not only in high speeds but also in sharp turns and on bumpy roads!

We used Locus Map as offline navigation for the whole trip and as we didn't want to spend money on Austrian highway ticket, we set Locus Map to navigate along toll free roads only. We got fond of riding local roads so much that we set the toll free navigation on even when traveling back via Germany and Czech republic where motorbikes aren't charged for highway use. Thus we enjoyed the moto ride much more than if we chose fast (and not much comfortable with our low wind shield), straight and boring highway route.

The next day we got off to a hike in the mountains to stretch our limbs stiffen from a long motorcycle ride. Locus Map ways of course with us. We recorded the whole trip with the track recording function. You can check it on the picture below. We recommend this route for the moto as well as the tarmac road is almost parallel to the hiking path. Our bottoms were a bit sore from the previous day so the hike was an obvious choice of the day.

If you'd like to use Locus Map on a motorbike, we strongly recommend touchscreen gloves. We had ordinary gloves without the touchscreen coating which was pretty uncomfortable - we had to put them off every time we wanted to use the phone. The moto touchscreen gloves offer is nothing to write home about - actually, we spied out just one model, leather. We prefer leather-free clothing (and gloves). If you happen to share a tip on good textile touchscreen moto gloves, we'll appreciate it and all Locus Map moto community as well!

Maybe it looks like we've just discovered America but we recommend water resistant phone (or at least case) for motor biking. Again, we didn't have it and according to Murphys laws it started to rain heavily on the third day of our trip. We had opportunity to find out thoroughly that our waterproof riding suits are NOT waterproof and the phone with Locus Map navigation started to misbehave after the first contact with rain drops. The procedure then was following: stop the bike (preferably under a bridge), take the glove off, pull the phone out of the pocket, look where to go on, put it back to pocket, put the glove on, and move on in the downpour.

Do you use Locus Map when (motor) biking? Share your experience or your favourite routes that you would like to recommend to other Locus Map users!

Článek Locus Team on a motorbike in Austrian Alps se nejdříve objevil na Locus Map - mobile outdoor navigation app.