Driving in countries were offline maps are unavailable

MC Highway

We are making a world tour (motorworldtour.com) and are visting Iran among other countries. For Iran it is not possible to download the offline map, because it is not available for download. Also some of the stan countries are not available.
What options do we have to use the route from myrouteapp.com, but without the offline maps? We won't have an Internet connection in all those countries and especially not in the whole country.
Please help.

sudolea

OpenStreetMap ? You could most probably download the maps from there ? Not that I tried it myself, but I once upon a time downloaded a bicycle GPS map from OpenStreetMap material...

edit : http://download.geofabrik.de/asia.html

Herko ter Horst

To add to that suggestion, the OsmAnd app can do navigation based on OpenStreetMap maps (which are indeed available for Iran and stan countries and can be downloaded beforehand for a small fee) and GPX files exported from MRA.

Inge Bakermans

@herko-ter-horst You just beat me to the Osmand suggestion - I use that for the bike and works pretty darn good.

sudolea

Triggered by the question (and the OSMAnd answer), I downloaded OSMAnd and tried it out, as I didn't know it. There are 7 free downloads coming with it, and I downloaded Flanders, then 2 Austrian regions. I was impressed by the detailed information on these offline maps, and I'll definitely use it in the next holiday's family hikes in Austria... So as a test, I tried to generate the Luxemburg data myself and tried to get it on my phone. Worked OK !

So then I successfully generated Iran too, but as this was a file of 600+MB, I didn't try it on my phone. But it can be generated indeed using OsmAndMapCreator. The steps :

download the Iran .osm.pbf data file from geofabrik.de
download OsmAndMapCreator
create the map with OsmAndCreator :
° start it
° File -> Create .obf from .osm
° select the Iran .osm.pbf file, and
° press OK.
after some time, you should obtain the Iran .obf file

Of course, do this at your own risk : I don't want you to get lost in Iran in the foreseeable future

MC Highway

@sudolea thanks, we will try to do that when having a non-driving day on monday.

Inge Bakermans

@mc-highway I suggest you get the osmand+ version - one time payment euro 24,99 - which gives you unlimited maps.

sudolea

@inge-bakermans True indeed, if you're on the road already (as I seem to understyand now). Moreover, you support the open source project. But it was a challenge to me to try it out, nothing more...