I've seen GAIA mentioned a number of times on here and had played with it a bit in the past and wasn't too impressed by it. But with my beloved Trimble GPS phasing out this month I had to make a change. OnX Maps was way to buggy and limited for any of my uses aside from property owner identification, both the web interface and iPhone App.
I saw on another forum that Gaia was offering "Trimble Refugees" a free year of GAIA Pro and I decided to try that, I'd just been using the free version before. I emailed them and within 15 minutes had an invite for a free year of GAIA pro.
I'm not suggesting anyone dishonestly take advantage of their very generous offer if they're not actually a previous Trimble user but for those of you left high and dry by Trimble I'd suggest reaching out to Gaia. Even without the free offer I think $30/year is very fair for what they offer.
I've been really impressed with the GAIA pro so far. It's a lot like Trimble in that it has a good public land layer but no property owner detail, which for my uses is actually all that I need as I'm just trying to stay off of private not contact landowners. It's very fast and easy to navigate and is constantly syncing with your phone. The GMU overlay is way more accurate than Trimble and you can select the overlay per state by species which is awesome.
I've had a number of what I thought were "gripes" with the interface but after an email to tech support found out I was just missing some of the features already built into the software. I really like that you can create areas similar to Google Earth, something Trimble couldn't do.
The cache feature is a little limited because they actually have to pay a royalty to the map image source company (so I'm told) so you can't go download 2GB of imagery all at once, but it's not too bad just a little time consuming. After some getting used to I'm liking it as much as Trimble and have used it in the field a bit and the app is probably better than Trimble's.
Hope this helps some of you as you start pouring over maps getting ready for next season.
I saw on another forum that Gaia was offering "Trimble Refugees" a free year of GAIA Pro and I decided to try that, I'd just been using the free version before. I emailed them and within 15 minutes had an invite for a free year of GAIA pro.
I'm not suggesting anyone dishonestly take advantage of their very generous offer if they're not actually a previous Trimble user but for those of you left high and dry by Trimble I'd suggest reaching out to Gaia. Even without the free offer I think $30/year is very fair for what they offer.
I've been really impressed with the GAIA pro so far. It's a lot like Trimble in that it has a good public land layer but no property owner detail, which for my uses is actually all that I need as I'm just trying to stay off of private not contact landowners. It's very fast and easy to navigate and is constantly syncing with your phone. The GMU overlay is way more accurate than Trimble and you can select the overlay per state by species which is awesome.
I've had a number of what I thought were "gripes" with the interface but after an email to tech support found out I was just missing some of the features already built into the software. I really like that you can create areas similar to Google Earth, something Trimble couldn't do.
The cache feature is a little limited because they actually have to pay a royalty to the map image source company (so I'm told) so you can't go download 2GB of imagery all at once, but it's not too bad just a little time consuming. After some getting used to I'm liking it as much as Trimble and have used it in the field a bit and the app is probably better than Trimble's.
Hope this helps some of you as you start pouring over maps getting ready for next season.
