The map on your rig can now do two things it could not do a week ago. It can search for a place by name, and it can hand you turn-by-turn directions to get there. All of it works with the map you already loaded, without a cell signal, without an internet connection, without anything more than Headwaters and the wifi it puts out on your rig.
Search for a place, by name
Start typing in the search box at the top of the map. A gas station chain, a national park, a diner name, the town you are heading to for the weekend. As you type, matches come back from the map you already loaded, ranked so the ones near you show first.
Behind the scenes, Headwaters is running its own local search engine against the map data on the CM5. Nothing about that search leaves your rig. It does not need your phone to have signal. It does not phone home to Google or Apple to figure out what you meant. The search results are drawn from the same map you can see, using data that is already sitting on your device.
Get a route to it
Pick a place from the results and Headwaters will draw a blue line from where you are to where you are going, with a turn-by-turn list down the side. Total distance and time at the top, then every turn in order, with the road name and how far away it is.
You can pick how you want to travel. Drive is the default. There is also an RV mode that respects the kind of routing you want for a rig, plus bike and walk for when you have the trailer parked and you are exploring on foot or on wheels. Pick the mode and Headwaters gives you a route that fits.
Once a route is up, the top of the map shows the next thing you need to do. Turn right on Main Street in three tenths of a mile. As you move, that banner updates. When you pass a turn, the next one takes its place. The whole turn-by-turn list stays available on the side so you can look ahead if you want to.
Where this shines
The whole reason this matters is that you are often somewhere your phone is not. State parks, national forest land, the back roads between two campgrounds, a stretch of desert or a valley with no bars. That is exactly where you most want to be able to say, what is around here, and how do I get to it.
With this in place, you can pull up the Headwaters map from your phone, laptop, or tablet on your rig's wifi, look up a trailhead by name, and hand yourself a route to it. Even if the tower is a hundred miles away.
Planning tomorrow around the campfire is a good use of it too. You know the general area you want to be in. You can search up nearby places, see how far they are, and mentally line up a plan without having to hike up the hill until your phone finds signal.
What it does not do yet
This is not a full replacement for the navigation systems you are used to. Not yet. The biggest thing to know up front is house-number accuracy on residential streets. If you search for a specific home address on a small street, Headwaters will usually get you to the correct street in the correct neighborhood, but the exact house number is not always in the data. The pin lands close, not perfect. When we know the result is approximate, we say so in the interface rather than pretend it is dead-on.
Businesses, parks, campgrounds, gas stations, points of interest, town names, and major addresses land accurately. The soft spot is specifically the house-number level on the smaller neighborhood streets.
It also does not talk to you. There is no spoken turn-by-turn voice yet. Instructions are on the screen. That will come.
Live traffic is not in the picture and probably will not be. Traffic requires the network you are trying not to depend on. What you get instead is a route that is always available, on every road that exists on the map you loaded.
The goal is a real, mainstream navigator
The direction we are headed is the same experience you get from the big-name navigation apps, minus the requirement that the internet be there for you to have it. Full turn-by-turn directions. Voice cues. Cleaner address handling. Search suggestions that read your intent. Route options and alternates.
Getting there is a marathon, not a sprint. What landed this week is the first honest chunk of it. You can search a place, you can get a route to that place, and you can follow it from your rig without a signal. Everything after this is refinement. More accuracy, more polish, more of the familiar behaviors people expect.
For the moment though, this is a real capability that was not there before. If you are the kind of camper who ends up in places without service and has ever wished you could just look something up on a real map from your rig, this is that.
Standing on some big shoulders
Every part of this map and search story on Headwaters is built on top of open source work by other people. We want to name them, because they deserve the credit.
The map itself comes from OpenStreetMap. That is a worldwide, all-volunteer effort where regular people map the roads, trails, businesses, and landmarks in their corner of the planet. Every route we draw and every place we can find on Headwaters is drawn from what those contributors have mapped. If you have ever added a trail or fixed a wrong turn on an online map, you have probably touched OpenStreetMap.
Place search runs on a project called Photon, an open source geocoder from the team at Komoot. That is what takes what you type into the search bar and turns it into real results.
Turn-by-turn routing runs on Valhalla, an open source routing engine that has been in development for many years. That is what turns a start point and an end point into a real route with roads, distances, and directions.
We owe a real thank you to everyone who has poured time into those projects. A capability like this, offline, on a small computer inside an RV, is not something we could have built alone. It is a great example of what open source makes possible. In the same spirit, we hope the work we are putting into TrailCurrent gives something back to others down the road.
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