roving1
Well-known member
I read somewhere dark mode has finally come to Android devices so I had to check it out. I turned it on and it's pretty sexy. I hate being blinded by white backgrounds and blank white data fields. It looks really good now and is so much easier on the eyes. The Gaia topo layer is optimized for night mode too and works pretty well.
I bought a new 512GB SD card so I decided to reinstall Gaia fresh and organize new map downloads for it. The first night I selected Gaia topo and the MVUM for MI and then just Gaia topo for all the states West of the Mississippi and all of Mexico. Not sure when I went to bed but when I woke up in the morning I was happy to see all the downloads had completed. So the next day I added a bunch of MVUM, cell coverage, US TOPO and sat imagery as well as a bunch of stuff covering the KAT (Kentucky Adventure Tour). The sat layer and US TOPO have taken ages in the past. So far an hour in it looks like this info will load by morning as well. That's around 80GB in two sessions that went pretty timely.
This seems to be a huge improvement. Particularly the Gaia stuff which they probably run the servers for. It took days and days and days running 24 hours a day the last time I downloaded not even as much data. I think updating my phone with maps took me a week once. Anyone else notice this has improved?
Some tips I have used to make things better for large downloads both when I thought DLs were slower and now.
When selecting layers select only one layer at a time and always select Gaia Topo first. If you select all your layers all at once you run the risk of the slowest server gumming up the works for everything. If you run out of time you might need to cancel and start over. Doing one at a time lessens this and doing Gaia topo first is the best as it is the fastest layer to download. This way in a worse case scenario you still get a good base layer first and then you can only cancel whatever layer is taking the longest to download.
Always leave the unit with Gaia on the home screen while downloading. No matter the setting or permission granting it seems something will always timeout the downloads if the app isn't anchored on the home screen. I just leave it on the map and turn the brightness down.
I bought a new 512GB SD card so I decided to reinstall Gaia fresh and organize new map downloads for it. The first night I selected Gaia topo and the MVUM for MI and then just Gaia topo for all the states West of the Mississippi and all of Mexico. Not sure when I went to bed but when I woke up in the morning I was happy to see all the downloads had completed. So the next day I added a bunch of MVUM, cell coverage, US TOPO and sat imagery as well as a bunch of stuff covering the KAT (Kentucky Adventure Tour). The sat layer and US TOPO have taken ages in the past. So far an hour in it looks like this info will load by morning as well. That's around 80GB in two sessions that went pretty timely.
This seems to be a huge improvement. Particularly the Gaia stuff which they probably run the servers for. It took days and days and days running 24 hours a day the last time I downloaded not even as much data. I think updating my phone with maps took me a week once. Anyone else notice this has improved?
Some tips I have used to make things better for large downloads both when I thought DLs were slower and now.
When selecting layers select only one layer at a time and always select Gaia Topo first. If you select all your layers all at once you run the risk of the slowest server gumming up the works for everything. If you run out of time you might need to cancel and start over. Doing one at a time lessens this and doing Gaia topo first is the best as it is the fastest layer to download. This way in a worse case scenario you still get a good base layer first and then you can only cancel whatever layer is taking the longest to download.
Always leave the unit with Gaia on the home screen while downloading. No matter the setting or permission granting it seems something will always timeout the downloads if the app isn't anchored on the home screen. I just leave it on the map and turn the brightness down.
