UKC

Looking for an app for road biking where I can pre-plan a route online and store it on my phone to ride later, but has a sat-nav style function so I can follow the route with my phone on the handle bars.

I've been using MapMyRide, but the max back-light timeout is 2 minutes.

In reply to lewismansell:

View ranger all day long

In reply to Darkskys:

Looks good, thanks! Is there any way to make it follow roads rather than go direct?

In reply to lewismansell:
Have a look at Back country navigator, they do a free 3 week trial to play around with. for UK you select multimap UK OS Explorer which goes to 1:25k, so you should be catered for at every level of detail to your choice. You can overlay .gps routes (your own plotted or 3rd party routes you downloaded), record your own real time and even plot routes (I tend to use mapmyride/bikehike for that tho, like you). After the 3 weeks trial, you can pay one off £6.99 for it thereafter. others cost much more to buy small tiles of OS maps. Use it for biking and hiking. The key thing is to use your wifi at home to copy and store the OS maps required on your phone to use offline. you can keep them or erase depending on phone storage capacity.

In reply to lewismansell: CycleStreets or Bike Hub, both free on the Google Play app store. Both use OpenStreetMap mapping and will follow cycle paths as well as roads. I find the CycleStreets user interface for route planning and live tracking more intuitive but Bike Hub has more background info eg local bike shops & clubs.

In reply to Darkskys:

ViewRanger is the one I use, but for road cycling it has one major complication:

If you create a route on the website (with 'follow road' enabled) and sync it to the phone, you get a waypoint (and hence trigger the alarm) at every bend in the road. Useless! If you only have waypoints at relevant junctions then the navigation display is useless (it doesn't often point in the right direction) and you can't use the 'off-route' alarm function (which is great for warning you when you've gone wrong).

I've managed to get round this with a script which modifies the GPX file to turn off the proximity alarm on 'bends' and to attach different sounds to waypoints so I get a useful audible indication of a turn ("Oy, left turn coming up!"). The latter means the phone screen can stay off most of the time and save battery power.

It works, but it's a bit of a pain to set up a route (create route, sync phone, export gpx to PC (via DropBox), run script, import modified gpx from PC), so gets infequent use.

Any better solutions?

In reply to Martin W:

I had a look at CycleStreets, but for me it's useless in that it doesn't allow me to plan the route - it just work out the 'best' route for me.

In reply to Marek: You can set as many intermediate waypoints as you need in order to make the route go where you want. Tap at the start point, then tap at each intermediate waypoint (on open road sections, not junctions, os it knows which way to go) until you reach the destination. Each waypoint you set after the first will be shown in red, meaning destination, when you first tap it but as you add further waypoints the previous ones turn yellow, meaning intermediate. When you've set the final waypoint at the destination tap "Tap here to route" and your route will be completed for you. It even works with circular routes.