Route planning on your phone
John Ellerton
The integration of Bike Tracker and RideWithGPS is excellent, but I can only plan on my phone using RideWithGPS if I take out a paid subscription. Yes, I'm tight fisted ! and as I don't always have the laptop with me, I cannot plan routes on the fly.
I have only just recently been looking at route planning on the phone. There are probably several others, but I have had good experiences with both plotaroute and cycle.travel. IMHO both have excellent implementations on the phone and the free versions are very usable (some features are premium).
Planning with plotaroute is similar to using RideWithGPS. Drag the map to the next route point and repeat until you've completed your route.
Planning with cycle.travel is slightly different. It is more of a route finder between a start point and an end point. It tries to find quiet routes (in terms of traffic) rather than direct routes. This suits me as I hate riding busy roads. After entering your start and end points, you can tap on the "To" box and select "Round-trip" to make a circular route. Tap on the route to add a "Via point" and then drag these to alter your route if you so wish.
Both have options to export routes as TCX files.
NB: on plotaroute, set the "Turn warnings" slider to 0, as Bike Tracker already does this, and handles it far better.
NB: On cycle.travel, use the "TCX course" option as that option includes all the turn instructions for Bike Tracker. Leave the "Announce turns" box clear, as Bike Tracker handles this.
Then use File Manager to move the TCX file from your download folder to the data\TCX folder. It will then be available to load into Bike Tracker.
Works for me.