Navigation modes
A tour south. Two and a half days of asphalt down to the coast, then a morning in a dune field where no map on earth knows a road, and tarmac again in the evening, right up to the hotel. Three completely different ways of being guided. One plan.
The app doesn’t ask which mode you’re in. It asks one thing only: what are you going by right now?
Following roads: the route with character
The ordinary case, and the one every navigation app manages: mapped ways, turn instructions, a fresh route when you miss a turn. It only gets interesting at the question of which roads.
Where there are several sensible ways, the route takes the one with fewer traffic lights and fewer roundabouts, and leaves the big cities off to the side. It does not make a big detour to do it.
It likes twisty roads, and as a quality, not a tally: a hairpin is something different from a long sweeper, and a roundabout is not a curve. The scenery counts too.
With a connection, the route is calculated on our side, where there is more knowledge about every road than the phone holds. Without one, the phone calculates on its own. The profile stays what it is: Tourer stays Tourer, Adventure stays Adventure. The phone knows the roads, but not the curves, the views and other details.
Four profiles for the bike
Four profiles to choose from, picked per route.
Fast - the first and the last day of a multi-day tour. Fast gets you away from home quickly and reliably, and back again at the end, pretty much the way a car with an ordinary navigation system would drive, freeway included. Only where there are several options does it take the one with fewer traffic lights, less city and, if it works out, the prettier one. It makes no extra detours.
Tourer - what you bought the bike for. Backroads instead of freeway, the line a local would ride, with curves and scenery.
Adventure Light - for 80/20 or 70/30 tires. Asphalt as the base, gravel welcome, but with restraint. And for anyone who does not want to spend the whole day on gravel with a 280 kg bike - but does not fear it either.
Adventure - for 50/50 tires, and a mode of its own. Adventure does not ask how fast a road is, but what kind of road it is. That is why it takes the piste where the others take the asphalt. And that is why the arrival time here is a rough guide, not an appointment.
You can change your mind on the road, too. The ride keeps going, and so does the recording: you set the next destination, pick the profile that suits it, and ride. Fast to the border, Tourer over the pass, NoRoad into the dune field.
Off-road mostly means off-asphalt
What most people call off-road is really off-asphalt: gravel tracks, pistes, unpaved roads that are on the map. That is exactly what Adventure does, with a perfectly ordinary route and turn instructions.
Adventure shows what it can do wherever the country allows it. Whether you may ride a gravel track isn’t in the map. It’s on the sign along the track and in the country’s laws. Many countries protect everything beyond the roads that are open, some of them very strictly. In the end the sign and the law count, not the route.
Without a road: NoRoad, bearing navigation
Off-road, taken literally: off the road, not just off the asphalt.
There are places where it’s not the road that ends, but the map’s say in the matter. Desert. Steppe. A dry riverbed. A dune field that will look different next week. The Sahara, Mongolia.
NoRoad is for those places, and for anyone who does not want to flip through a paper roadbook on the handlebars out there. You drop a waypoint, point the bike at it and find the path yourself. NoRoad works out no route, because there is nothing to work out. On the map there is the line to the next point, plus the distance as the crow flies. No turn instruction, no snapping onto a road that is not there. A point counts as reached once you are close enough, and what close enough means, you set yourself.
Among houses and roads it makes no sense, unless you’re playing scavenger hunt. Anyone who rides in places like that understood long ago what this mode does. Anyone who did not probably does not need it.
On your own line: following a GPX track
You have a GPX. Off a forum, from a buddy, out of ten years of collected tours. That gives you three ways.
As a route. The app turns the line into waypoints, and your profile calculates the stretch between them. If the route strays from the line somewhere, you move a few waypoints there or try another profile until it fits. You can also edit the waypoints it set to your taste right away. Closures that are in the map with dates apply: over a pass that closes for winter you get no route in December, but planning for July works fine.
As a template. You show the line on the map and plan your own route next to it, with your own waypoints.
As a line: TraceRide. You ride the line yourself, the app lays it onto the roads and calls out the turns. Somebody else’s line is not a planned route: there is no next waypoint. There is only the line.
So when you leave it - construction, coffee, a sign you believed - what follows is not what you are used to. No new route. No “make a U-turn when possible.” You get the way back onto your line, and forward: onto a point ahead of you, not onto the spot where you came off. Anyone who has been sent twenty kilometers back down a road they had just ridden knows why that is the whole difference.
If the line cannot be laid onto roads, you ride it like NoRoad, without turn instructions. The app tells you, without asking.
The seam: legs, variants, multi-day tour
Now the part the industry has no word for.
A trip lives in the app as a folder. In it sit the planned legs, the fallback routes, the whole structure of a multi-day tour. Each section brings its own kind of guidance: the run south as Fast, the dune field as NoRoad, the evening as Tourer right up to the hotel. Even a GPX line is allowed to be a link in the chain.
When the folder advances, it is not the ride that ends at the end of the run south, but the section. The next one loads and keeps going. No dialog, no prompt, no “would you like to.” You stop at the gas station because you want fuel, not because the software has a question.
And the variants. At home you rarely plan one route. You plan three. The handsome one over the pass. The short one, for the day your backside takes a different view from your head after four days. The one along the valley, because the forecast from Thursday on is either lying or it is not.
All three sit in the same folder. Only ever one of them is live, the others are parked and the chain steps over them. Not deleted, just set aside. Evening at the hotel, beer beside you: one off, one on. In the morning the app rides the one you settled on and keeps the rest for the day after.
Two things it deliberately does not do. It never reorders you. And it skips nothing on its own: if the next section starts a little farther on, it tells you and loads it anyway. You built that folder, not the app. How, you will find in the manual under Planning a multi-day trip.
In the group
On a group ride, whoever leads the group hands the current route out to everyone. Everybody rides it with their own app and hears their own announcements. Whoever falls behind, gets stuck at a light or takes a wrong turn, their app leads back onto the group route, and so to the group.
Sharing tours: GPX and .mnav
Sharing happens outside the app: in a forum, by email, by text message, anywhere you swap tours with others.
GPX carries lines. It does not carry order. For a single line that is enough, and everybody understands GPX.
Anyone sending a whole trip, with legs, tracks and routes mixed and a sequence that means something, sends it as .mnav. The whole folder travels: structure, order, which variant is parked, and whether it advances. Nobody at the far end has to sort anything out. They ride, or they decide on the spot which of the variants you planned is the live one. More under GPX and .mnav.