# Altitude checking



## barryd (May 9, 2008)

One of my biggest bugbears while planning trips when already away is calculating Altitude / Elevation. None of the usual suspects of devices are much help. Paper maps, road atlas, sat nav etc are great for plotting routes but don't show you how high places are.

There are some good reasons why elevation is important.
Weather. Where we are now in the French Alps about 3500ft up and not far from Geneva it's about 23c. Lovely. 15 miles away down at Lake Leman it's about 28c. So when it's blisteringly hot above 30c, getting yourself up to 4000ft or more can be a good thing and vice versa

Scenery. I like walking and looking at mountains. Many of the walks we did in Jura where in forests and trees. I like to get above the tree line where the Marmots and Chamoix are abundant and you can see for miles around you.

Route planning. It's often difficult from a map to see how high a route goes or how high your destination is. Ok so you can usually tell by the twists and turns on the map but who knows if one route goes up to 6000ft and back down again whereas another one maybe only goes to 3000ft?

Google Earth is the only online tool I have found that shows Elevation but its road mapping is useless and its resource and internet hungry so when you're on a poor connection it's hopeless. Ideally Google maps would be great but it doesn't show Elevation which is a big shame as it's the quickest to load.

So with all this in mind today I came across this site. http://www.doogal.co.uk/RouteElevation.php Google maps elevation for a route.

You can put in coordinates or place names and it will calculate the route as Google maps would but it also shows your start and end elevation and the amount of descents and assents in between as well as the highest and lowest points of the journey. As we spend so much time in the mountains this is really useful.

I just thought some of you might find it useful. However if you know any other methods of calculating Altitude for a trip I would love to hear them.


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## fatbuddha (Aug 7, 2006)

thanks for the link to that site - it's very useful 

as a cyclist, it can be useful sometimes to see the elevation of a planned route so you can estimate what effort you have to put in and calculate an ETA if meeting someone or you have deadline. the hillier the slower!

it would be interesting to know where he pulls the elevation data from to see how accurate it is.

the problem with a lot of GPS based maps like Gmaps is that GPS is actually a poor tool for calculating altitude - great for longitude and latitude of course

there are some other mapping tools around that provide altitude data but not quite as neat as this one.


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## Glandwr (Jun 12, 2006)

Plenty of smartphone apps for the job Barry. Playstore is full of them and they seem fairly accurate on my S11.

For planning Osmand will give you altitude at any point you chose on the map

Dick


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## GEMMY (Jun 19, 2006)

I have a cheapo Garmin for the scooter, with a button that says "where am I" press that and the lat/long comes up along with elevation.

tony


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## rayrecrok (Nov 21, 2008)

Hi.

I run the old Garmin Street Pilot I use on the bike when travelling alongside the tomtom, the Street Pilot has altitude on it where the tomtom dosen't.


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## pomme1 (May 19, 2005)

As someone who has cycled in the Alps/Dolomites/Pyrenees for more years that I care to remember, and who regularly motorhomes there, I have to say that I've never had a problem with interpreting maps. 

I've just had a look at my paper maps from Freytag & Berndt, Kompass and Touring Club Italiano and many others, all of them have spot heights for important features, including towns and villages, passes etc, not to mention contour shading.

I think this really may be an area where technology is getting in the way of an essentially very simple process.

Roger


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## rayrecrok (Nov 21, 2008)

pomme1 said:


> As someone who has cycled in the Alps/Dolomites/Pyrenees for more years that I care to remember, and who regularly motorhomes there, I have to say that I've never had a problem with interpreting maps.
> 
> I've just had a look at my paper maps from Freytag & Berndt, Kompass and Touring Club Italiano and many others, all of them have spot heights for important features, including towns and villages, passes etc, not to mention contour shading.
> 
> ...


Hi.

Err whar are maps?, are they something folk used in the "Olden days". :wink:

ray.


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## barryd (May 9, 2008)

Thanks guys. Ray. Does your sat nav show you the elevation at points along a planned route though? If it does thats really useful. 

I have the 2012 Michelin road atlas for France and two huge paper maps. Yes they show the odd height of a col or pass which can be useful but none of them are that clear. 

I use the French Camping car infos site a lot for finding wild camping spots in the hills and its superb and what I often want to do is find the elevation of said spot. What would be really useful is to find that information out offline either using a sat nav or app.

Apps are ok but most of them need to be online, thus eating into the data allowance and if I am online with the laptop as I am now I might as well use that.


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## flyinghigh (Dec 10, 2012)

Most any old aviation GPS will show elevation to within about 50 ft
Plenty of garmins with out of date databases available , like wise to really accurate a old altimeter 2 1/2 inch are cheap to buy, just need to input the local barometer pressure were you are,


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## nicholsong (May 26, 2009)

My Garmin hand-held on the boat usually has me about 30' above sea level - but I know my boat does not go that high :wink: 

Geoff


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## listerdiesel (Aug 3, 2012)

Altitude also affects vehicles, especially normally-aspirated types without inlet air pressure/volume sensing.

If you're m/h is a bit lacking in power, going higher will make it worse. 

Peter


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## Carl_n_Flo (May 10, 2005)

Try and get your hands on any just out of date aviation charts (not maps!!!) - CAA publish them in the UK.

These will show ALL heights above sea level - mountains, features, etc. - basically anything that could be a danger to an aircraft flying into them!!!!

CT 8)


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## Jeannette (Aug 7, 2012)

nicholsong said:


> My Garmin hand-held on the boat usually has me about 30' above sea level - but I know my boat does not go that high :wink:
> 
> Geoff


Thats because it will using the WGS84 Geodetic Datum which assumes the earth is round and not elliptical. This produces errors at actual sea level where the datum does not fit correctly!! The errors are exasperated by signal error caused by position and reflection. More sophisticated units can correct this by adding a fudge factor for known positions.

Military & Commercial flight training left me a whole load of useless factoids....

Regards
Steve
\


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## barryd (May 9, 2008)

Thanks

Devices that show how high it is where you are currently are not really any good for planning though. What I need is something that shows how high a point is where I am going.  

The TomTom for instance is useful in that I can tap on the map and it shows me the lat and long. If it also showed me the elevation then that would be superb but it doesnt.

Thanks to that site though I now know that tomorrows journey which is exactly 20 miles starts at 948 metres, ends at 1430 metres the highest point is 1650 and lowest 850 with a total descent of 715 with Ascents totaling 1196 so I am mainly going up! 

There is a good chance of some good views where we end up and maybe the odd Marmot!

EDIT: I forgot to mention regarding Peters post about engines perfoming poorly up high. I havent noticed this too much in the van which has been as high as 10000ft but the bike which is a 100cc 2 stroke runs like a bag of spanners at over 7000ft but this could just down to the fact that its completely shagged out after towing two grown adults up a mountain with one little baby piston!


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## listerdiesel (Aug 3, 2012)

barryd said:


> EDIT: I forgot to mention regarding Peters post about engines perfoming poorly up high. I havent noticed this too much in the van which has been as high as 10000ft but the bike which is a 100cc 2 stroke runs like a bag of spanners at over 7000ft but this could just down to the fact that its completely shagged out after towing two grown adults up a mountain with one little baby piston!


Most modern vans with ECU-controlled engines will be pretty much OK, but there are a heck of a lot of older ones which will find the going a bit tough, just like me 

Peter


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## NigeT (Sep 22, 2010)

You can try Memory Map allows to to plot a route and gives you altitude etc on OS maps, we have used it a lot for route planning also plots where you have ben.

On my smartphone I use MMTracker does the same thing.

Memory map also do a phone app.


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## iandsm (May 18, 2007)

*Height*

If you have an iPhone the app, "height finder" does not need to be online as it uses no data and is pretty accurate.


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## Landyman (Apr 3, 2010)

*Re: Height*



iandsm said:


> If you have an iPhone the app, "height finder" does not need to be online as it uses no data and is pretty accurate.


Thanks for that!
Just downloaded the app and it looks really good, particularly as it's free and so far no adverts.

Landyman..


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## Christine600 (Jan 20, 2011)

Depending on which TomTom you have there is an addon that will display the height on the screen.

Works on my 930 but it took a bit of fiddling to get it properly set up.

http://gps.dg4sfw.de/index.php/menuid=57


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## barryd (May 9, 2008)

Brilliant suggestions thanks. I do have an iphone so will give it a go when I have a better connection.

Been a useful thread thanks everyone.


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## BrianJP (Sep 17, 2010)

Osmand+ Satnav app has setting to show altitude when driving


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