I navigate in the backcountry with iphones in airplane mode. It does not turn off gps in iphone 5s (several trips in Colorado) or iphone SE1 (John Muir Trail thru-hike).

good to know. thank you.

Interesting. Turned on my SE3 in airplane mode, location services on and walked outside to use the Maps app that came with the iPhone. The location came in showing lat-long, but no map. it doesn't need much, the base map with no additional detail would be good, but a bare page with nothing but the lat-long coordintes showing is a bit too bare bones to be useful.

My Garmin Geko has more usefulness because I can add waypoints as reference points.

Any better apps out there that show map features when in airplane mode?

https://osmand.net/

https://caltopo.com/

Are two offline map apps I hear of the most.

Thanks, that might work.

Airplane mode for offline map use must be used with offline maps like geospatial pdf's and apps that use offline maps. Currently, I make my geospatial pdf with caltopo (desktop browser) and add the map to topomaps (iOS) for use in the field.

The most common app used these days for this is gaia gps for making the map and field use. Farout (formerly known as Guthook) is another commonly used app for buying maps. Caltopo can now do the same. There are other apps that can read geospatial pdf's, like Avenza and others.

You can't test offline maps use with google maps or apple maps, unless you have made the map for offline use.

How do .pdf maps work with the iPhone's GPS. Is your position shown on the map? If it's just a replacement for a paper map, I'll go with paper.

I'm looking at this to replace a Garmin GPSMAP 64sx. If an interactive map isn't available, then I'll just stay with a dedicated GPS.

Yes, your position is shown on the map. Forgot to mention an offline mapping app for Colorado named Cotrex.

You can test out how they work in just a few minutes by making a pdf map of your home location (I only use caltopo right not), uploading to your phone (or just using the caltopo app). It might can all be done on the phone although Caltopo has been taking features away from the phone that may be on their desktop website, because they have paid subscriptions for more full-featured use.

I don't know any way to have an iPhone project a GPS location onto a document like a PDF.

There are apps that can download map files and render a GPS location onto a moving map display, but they don't use PDF.

ATAK/CivTAK will do it, or atleast Android version will. iPhone version of ATAK isn't as feature complete afaik so don't know it if iTAK can yet.

https://www.civtak.org/download-atak/ or register and get it from https://tak.gov/ (anyone can register, I have an account).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMRLr9Ax6h8