this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Anyone aware of an offline local alternative to https://fogofworld.app/ ?
Dawarich has support for this. Be aware it is under very active development and has semi-frequent breaking changes though (No data loss, just manual steps to upgrade).
For example, here's my recent trip to Austin for the Counter-Strike Major:
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And with regular routing:
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It technically works offline because you can record your location and load it afterwards, but I use it by ingesting my location that is tracked by Home Assistant
The github link tells me access denied
Hmmm, it works for me. Here's the raw link in case it helps: https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
How do you expect to get positional tracking while being offline?
Why would you need an Internet connection to use GPS?
I didn't say you need internet connection. But you do need a satellite uplink. So, I wouldn't call that offline. Clearly, many others do so maybe I'm wrong.
Nah, GPS isn't a two-way thing. There's no way for the GPS system to track devices.
Your phone figures out where itself is using the satellites as markers, the phone doesn't emit any signals for this. It's offline.
Basically the way it works is GPS satellites broadcast a very accurate time signal, (and occasionally data about the satellites exact orbit). Your phone sees this and uses signals from at least four satellites to find it's location. It does this by measuring the delay in the signal between them. (Due to the speed of light, each signal will be delayed slightly). Knowing the delay in the signal you will know how far away you are from the satellite, and knowing the exact time along with it's orbit info will tell you where exactly the satellite is. But knowing that you're 13,000mi away from a satellite doesn't help much. But then if you look at the other signals you can see you're 16,000mi from another satellite, and so on which when you use 4 satellites will leave you with one possible spot you can be.
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Jaw drop moment for me... I did not know that.
I'd have probably expected that your phone automatically sends the device ID, but that's of course not necessary.
Is this what people think? That you need an internet connection tion to use GPS?
Man not everyone had a moment in their lives to stop and think about it. And it wasn't taught in school. No need to act condescending.
You're inferring a tone where there isn't one.
I was asking if this is a common misconception as I had assumed the userbase here was generally pretty tech savvy, and confusing GPS with internet seemed particularly strange.
That’s what I thought. I figured things like the original garmins had a quantity unlimited but very narrowly usable data plan, like old kindles. I did know that gps was invented before the internet was widespread, but I figured that today it was like fax machines, where the vast majority don’t actually have a landline connection anymore and use the internet instead.
Based on this comment section, I gathered that it was something else, but still didn’t expect it to be fucking radio.
Hey don't feel dumb. There's a billion things the smartest person on the planet doesn't know.
It's a pretty clever system honestly, I found it fascinating.
I don’t feel dumb, lol. It’s very far from my areas of interest. I’m sure I’ve got more incorrect opinions about all sorts of fields I don’t think much about. The important thing is, I know how to research.
You also didn't open with "how do you expect it to work" without actually knowing how it works.
I wouldn't call a satellite uplink "offline".
There is no "uplink", eg transmission of data from the client back to the satellite.
Navsats and OpenStreetMaps?
A GNSS.
GPS via Satellites is offline! All satellites do(*) is transmit down to the Earth's surface. Those signals will exist whether there's a receiver there (ie. Your phone) or not. A GPS works by detecting those signals (ideally it will get at least 4 different ones for best accuracy) and calculating your location by triangulating it based on the signals (**). No upload on your end is required, it's very similar to how radio works.
(*) As in, all they need to do is this. Specific satellites have different features for different jobs and specs. But all they have to do to make GPS work is transmit.
(**) I mean "triangulate" as in the principle of triangulation, as in being able to determine the geography of a point via the topology of it to other known points. It's not actual triangulation with satellites because a fourth one acts as a correction factor -- we're dealing with signals going the speed of light after all. But that isn't important for whether or not GPS needs to upload anything to work -- it doesn't.
Fog Of World really isn't so bad. For some reason it makes you back up to Dropbox or Onedrive but I suppose you could just not hook them up and keep it all offline. It's better than handing your data to some random company, I doubt Dropbox/Microsoft are going to analyze some random app's data like this to track you.