Outdoor Gear for Navigation

I have been using  OS maps  on my phone, tablet and laptop for the last couple of years having bought an annual subscription. 

OS Maps are great for planning and navigating in more remote places. The annual subscription provides the following:

• Unlimited access to both the Landranger (1:50,000) and Explorer (1:25,000) maps for the whole of the UK on any device.
• It’s very useful for route planning at home on the laptop.
• The phone and tablet apps use GPS to show your current location on the OS Map. 
• The OS Maps app can track and record your current trip, creating a record for yourself or to share later with others. 
• You can download a map covering your next planned route, so the map can be viewed off-line in remote locations, where there is no data connection.  There is no limit to the number of maps you can download. 
• Maps can be printed at home up to A3 in size. Having a printed map for navigating or as a backup to your device is very helpful, often essential, so I love this feature.  Having an annual subscription and printing my own maps has been so much cheaper than buying lots of paper maps to cover the areas I want to explore. I usually laminate my maps to make them waterproof although a good quality map case will work too. 

There is a free version of the OS Maps app too, which gives you access to a simplified but still useful map.

Is there anything I don’t like about it? 

Well a slight irritation is that you can’t lock a map at a specific scale. As you enlarge an area, the map will automatically switch from the Landranger (1:50,000) to Explorer (1:25,000) for example. Most of the time, this is very useful, but occasionally I would like to be able to lock the map to one scale. I believe OS Maps are planning to change this in a future update.