Unlike normal on road navigation where you are constrained to travelling on marked roads, in off-road travel you may be moving across areas where there are no paved roads or marked routes. You cannot, therefore, rely on the normal navigation tools that are used for on-road travel. In off-road driving, you, not your GPS system, decides where you go. An off-road GPS system shows your location on a topographic map, and you can plan your own path over the terrain that you will encounter. An off-road GPS System like the Fox 7 from Navigattor will also register and track your journey over this terrain as you travel across it, ensuring that you will always know where you are and should also be able to retrace your route if required.
Naturally however it is usually better to plan your route before you set our on a trip, and to use your offroad GPS system to find the most interesting and most scenic routes that are also likely to be possible to traverse in a 4WD vehicle. The aim of off-road route planning is to create a journey route across places where there may be no roads, no tracks and no signposts. With an off-road GPS you can safely plan your route across open spaces where there are no references at all , like a desert for example.
To plot a route using an off-road GPS you first open the topographic map on the system (The Fox7 is provided with a wide variety of worldwide maps and it is also possible to add your own maps to the system including scanned paper maps) on the map you zoom in and register individual points of interest on the map, these are called ‘waypoints’ and may mark interesting places that you would like to see, to visit or perhaps to camp for the evening, or perhaps they mark an important location like a crossroads or an intersection in the route, where it is important to change direction.
The collection of waypoints that you create, together represents a very specific ‘track’ and it is this track that you mainly follow when using an off-road GPS system. On Road GPS Systems calculate ‘routes’ based on a variety of algorithms but the specific road taken is not so important, unlike the very specific ‘tracks’ used for off road driving.
The FOX 7 is the latest off-road GPS Navigation device from Spanish company Navigattor. The The FOX 7 is a GPS built as a rugged and waterproof tablet PC. Its rugged and waterproof construction allows it to be used in 4×4, buggys, maxi trail bikes and quads. Check out the videos on the following pages to learn more about the Fox 7. and to see it in action. You can also listen to our Podcast interview with Ferran Revoltos of Navigattor where he explains the principles of offroad navigation.
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