The problem I have is on long trips (via bicycle or on foot) my phone’s battery hits 15% remaining and screen dims, which is essentially blank in daylight when navigating. I’m in airplane mode with wifi also disabled. So the only power consumers are the screen and the GPS receiver. Yet I’m still forced to power down, swap batteries, lose the clock time (which GPS strangely fails to correct), and wait to reacquire a GPS signal. Then OSMand remembers the route parameters but forgets the route (a bug).
Big hassle. I see 3 fixes:
-
Repurpose an old phone to receive the GPS signal and feed the lat/long over bluetooth to your navigation phone. Since a bluetooth radio in receive mode consumes around ⅒ the energy of a GPS receiver, the main phone battery will last much longer. The GPS phone need not power a screen, so it can obviously run quite long if it’s only powering GPS chips and bluetooth in tx mode.
-
Attach an external USB battery. I reject this because I don’t want to strap another box to my arm and run a cable into my water resistant phone strap.
-
Get an Android-compatible phone with a dual mode LCD, so a low-power e-Ink mode can be used in daylight. I reject this because I boycott Russia and IIRC only Russia has phones with dual mode displays. I would perhaps be open to buying just a raw dual mode screen (not from Russia or Israel) and then use it to replace a cracked screen on a 2nd hand phone.
I guess it’s debatable relevance to solorpunk travel. Two phones in case 1 consumes a little more power overall but it keeps a phone out of the landfill and makes it useful.
Maybe you could learn your way around and leave the phone off. Perhaps only power on the phone for emergency/when necessary
I only use it when I don’t know the route. Usually it’s when I’m on foot all day long in an unfamiliar foreign city.
Sometimes my memory is almost sufficient for the trip, in which case I turn off the screen and go purely off the audible instructions, which greatly increases the range by using less battery. But the timing and accuracy of the audibles is not accurate enough for completely unknown routes.
So do you have your screen turned off most of the time? I usually get through a day fine with a charge. And i use some internet, photos snd videos, record my track and navigate with osmand. I do bring a powerbank though.
If you bring a second phone, that is also a second device you’re carrying around, might as well be a small powerbank.