Episode: 4098
Title: HPR4098: Road trips without GPS
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4098/hpr4098.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:35:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,098 for Wednesday the 17th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Road Trips Without GPS.
It is hosted by Trey and is about seven minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a short off-the-cuff discussion of how we navigated road trips in the past.
Hello, this is Trey and this is an off-the-cuff recording.
I am about 200 miles into a 700-mile trip from the southeastern United States to the
northeastern United States.
I am not sightseeing, I am just trying to get from point A to point B and I made a stop
and after the stop my GPS decided it did not want to reconnect to data.
So I thought to myself, this might be a good opportunity to share with the HPR community
how I generally prepare for long distance trips like this and what type of redundancies
I have in place for when things go a little bit pear-shaped.
Now I have been driving for a long time, more than 40 years and long distance driving
like this, not driving a truck, not hauling any cargo, but living far away from where I
grew up and traveling to see friends that live in other parts of the country and traveling
around the country for work, for a period of my career.
I have done a lot of longer distance driving and I really do enjoy it.
And at the beginning when I started doing it we had maps, we had lots of paper maps.
In fact I made it a habit of making sure that I had the most recent road atlas for the
roads in the United States and a road atlas is really cool.
It's a paperback fairly thick maybe half an inch to three quarters of an inch thick paper
back book of maps for sections of each state in the United States because that was where
I was focused and that way if you needed to plan a route you could, if things changed
and you needed to reference your route you could do that.
We also had something that I grew up with which was trip ticks.
When my parents were planning trips they would go to the American Automobile Association
of which they were a member and they would get a trip tick and the trip tick was basically
a small custom made flip chart of maps for each section of the trip.
So they would tell the agent at the American Automobile Association, I'm going from point
a to point b, can you do a trip tick and they would figure out what the best route was.
They would also often figure out alternative routes and they would put them together in
this little flip chart so you could flip from section to section to section and know
where you're going get a little bit more detail for those sections than what you would
have in an Almanac or a big folded map to try to deal with while you're driving.
Now we very rarely use maps like that anymore because we have things like GPS and amazing
tools like that where our phones and our devices can tell us where to go and what speed to
go and whether there's any obstacles in the road or other hazards to be aware of.
And it's been a wonderful innovation but it doesn't always work like in this case where
I do not have enough of a signal now to load the next segment of my trip.
But I went ahead and had printed the trip section by section before I left.
So I have the equivalent of what those trip ticks used to be and I have those available
to me so I can look and see all right this is where I need to go next and to be honest
this particular trip is a trip that I've made hundreds of times and so I'm much more
familiar with the details of the trip and where I'm going and what to expect.
But there's also other issues that can happen on a long trip like this for instance there
may be road hazards there may be backups there may be law enforcement officers that are
making sure that you're traveling at a rate of speed that is safe and consistent with
what the law allows.
Being aware of those types of areas allow you to travel more safely so one of the other
things that I do use when I'm traveling long distance especially when I'm traveling
by myself is I keep a citizens band radio running in my vehicle.
I think 27 megahertz operates at and many of the trucks that do long distance travel pay
attention to some of the signals on that.
If I can be here it cut in in the background here you'll know that it's a signal coming
in from there and they'll post when there's a road hazard when there's a backup when
there's law enforcement at a specific area that you might want to be aware of and that
can just help me have a little bit of visibility further ahead in my trip that I do without
having my GPS doing what it would normally do and this is the way I used to do it and
I still use it as a backup and it's interesting to chat with people on the radio to once
in a while but mainly just use it to listen to see if there's there's hazards around
so when you are planning a trip that's going to take 10 to 12 hours like this one it does help
to be aware and to plan for redundancy what am I going to do if my phone just dies or if my
application that is going giving me navigation cuts out or you know some other issue there's no
cell signal when I'm trying to load it so some of the old school ways are not that bad
anyways I hope you enjoyed this this little chat down memory lane and how I'm still using it
today if you like it comment if you don't like it also comment or even better record a show of how
you would approach the same situation and look forward to hearing from you this is Tray
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