My primary hiking route planning software is Anquet OMN which I run on a W10 VM or on my Android phone. But it only handles OS map and DEM data for the United Kingdom. It runs fine in a VM which means I don’t have to put up with much Windows pish and nonsense any more. In fact I’ll be dumping the full W10 for Tiny10 soon which cuts out huge amounts of bloatware and doesn’t seem to still phone-home to Seattle despite being out of support.
For non-UK mapping I have been using Garmin Basemap with OSM maps downloaded. This works fine but is Windows only and I want fewer Windows apps not more.
Last year Joe @OE5JFE put me onto Viking GPS which is a Linux native mapping app that fetches OSM or OpenTopoMap data as needed and works wonderfully for creating and editing GPX routes and tracks. It also has a number of useful GPX tools that are no longer in OMN and this is nice. But most of the time gpsbabel does all I need for GPS upload/download, route<>track conversion, route reversal and route simplification.
Viking is really rather good.
Apart from 1 thing… I cannot get the DEM (digital elevation model) to work. You are meant to be able to setup accounts to download the DEM data and then when you fetch mapping data from OSM etc. it should also fetch suitable DEM data so that when you draw a route, not only do you get the waypoints locations but the elevation changes so you can plan route times. I have setup and account at the suggested DEM site and can log in but Viking does not download any DEM.
So if you are using Viking and have it fetching DEM data, please either explain all on here. Or if there’s magic you want to keep private, PM me so we can converse.
