Discussion: Route Gadget or Livelox?

Does your club/ organization use Route Gadget or Livelox for route replay or do you offer neither?
For years the standard in the US and Canada has been Route Gadget. It is a good program and I'm a happy user.
However in Florida where half the year I compete and stage events Livelox has become the standard. Livelox is also very good and offers some features that Route Gadget does not.
That was the reason for the post below.
Now what is your preference for route replay? Route Gadget, Livelox or none?


I notice you use Livelox for your course replay. Livelox works a lot like Route Gadget but offers several very good options that frankly, to me, makes it a much better option.
Do you offer the live tracking option?
We use Livelox exclusively in Florida and it is becoming quite popular with our participants.
Why is it popular? As the name suggests it allows for live tracking of participants carrying a mobile phone with the Livelox app open. For us that creates an increased level of safety.
Those being tracked by Livelox get their rouite automatically uploaded to the replay program. The rest of us can manually or by import of the gpx track add our routes.
The Livelox replay allows us to isolate and highlight the participants routes leg by leg. A few months ago I took advantage of that and analyzed one of our recent courses leg by leg
You can find out all about the Livelox program from the www.floridaorienteering.org website.

I've mostly used Route Gadget simply because that's what the majority of clubs in the US use.

I see advantages to Livelox as an organizer - in addition to safety, knowing the locations of participants would help for things like control pickup. But I think this could only be an option and not mandatory. Not everyone wants to take their expensive device out in the woods, and I still know orienteers who don't own a smartphone at all. So for some the live tracking is useless or impossible, unless clubs were willing to invest in some kind of tracker that is not easily broken and could be borrowed.

Isn't there a cost associated with Livelox as well? I mean if both are basically the same most people will pick the free option (Route Gadget)

You can use Livelox for free as an organizer or participant. There are extra features that you get if you are a paid subscriber. We use Livelox but never use the live tracking option. Don't really see any downsides!

Thanks Cristina, I did not know there was a free version. The live tracking is a nice feature, especially for anxious parents

NEOC currently uses both, but because 2 juniors (Mori Fand Bridget H) are interested in using Livolox over route gadget and have put in the time to make it happen for our events, we usually post Livelox for our events. I am sure there are those in the club who might still prefer Route Gadget, but not sure where that currently stands.

In terms of costs, Bridget contacted organizers during the pandemic to ask if they would start requiring a fee for individual use in the US down the road and they said that they would not for at least another year, or something along those lines. That was ~ 2 years ago now.

Our club (NEOOC) used Route Gadget for years, but have been using Livelox pretty much exclusively for the last couple of years. Primary reasons have been ease of setting up events (including score-o) and opportunity to offer the record/replay capability to a broader group through the ability to use a smartphone for recording one's route.

Our club is also encouraging more of our members across all of the skill levels to take advantage of this powerful learning tool by offering a paid club member subscription to those who upload a route from at least three of our events each year. We're gradually building a strong user base with routes being uploaded by 35%, 65% and 48% of all participants at three of our recent events.

To clarify comments about free vs paid subscription versions, Livelox is free to users who are only interested in viewing one route at a time - still a valuable tool to help one improve their orienteering skills. To utilize the capabilities of viewing multiple routes simultaneously, a paid subscription is required, although currently multi-route viewing capability is being provided free by Livelox, a courtesy being carried over from the pandemic.

SMOC gives paid Livelox subscription as a part of club membership.

For clubs looking for "value" to add to their memberships, a Livelox subscription is a good idea!

I'm with furlong...
If Livelox requires taking one's smartphone out on the course, that is a deal breaker.

It doesn’t.

Our club used to run Routegadget. We now use Livelox. Its easier. The integration with the Eventor-OMaps ecosystem gives us an extra reason to use it. We rarely use it for live tracking. And a club subscription is an extra incentive for club membership.

You can upload your trace to Livelox after the event from your usual recording device, just as you would with RouteGadget. I'd not heard of the live tracking option previously.

It was the live tracking feature of Livelox that got Florida Orienteering interested in Livelox. From time to time- like several times a year- Livelox has allowed the organizer to identify a wayward participant - like ones heading off the map, phone them and get them turned around.
As for me I would not want to carry an expensive phone into the terrain but those who use them generally get these holders that strap around one's bicep and that keeps the phone safe and sending the right signals.
So far these live tracks have only been available to the event organmizer as we have no interest in making route information available in advance to late starters. If we get a 'quarantine' scenario in place then we will open the tracking to all.
Again for me? It's good enough to load a gpx track after the event same as with Route Gadget.
An added bonus for the organizers in Florida where all the high school events are competitive with medals, trophies and ranking points up for grabs is that the Livelox tracking has often been able to confirm what the SI reading told us and the particpant disputed - that probably inadvertently the participant did not visit the point in question.

I realize you don't have to use the live tracking feature, but without it I don't see much reason for clubs to switch if they already have Route Gadget and it's working well. Just saying that if it ever became mandatory for safety reasons or such, that might not work out for everybody.

I have a phone armband (mostly for road type running) but that doesn't stop the phone from being damaged if there's a sudden downpour, I end up mostly submerged in a creek, I fall into a swamp, I take a big fall into/onto a tree/log/rocks or slam my shoulder into one, etc. And I'm a klutz, so all of those things have happened to me in the past, some of them multiple times. I have done a few Usynligo courses with the phone, but was taking those as training and moving more slowly/carefully. I often charge up and take an old phone to things where it might be damaged (like kayaking) - good for calling 911 and taking photos, but without service I don't think it would work for live tracking.

As an end-user, I'll take Livelox over RouteGadget on any given day! It is like watching a basketball game vs. just reading the score and stats. The replay feature shows the all story vs. just the bottom line (on RG). Add that to the fact that you can focus on specific legs (the map rotates automatically) and you get a very powerful tool.

I think that the next big leap is going to be when an app would start using OCAD/OOM files instead of just graphic content to add a 3D feel or even calculate optimal routes vs. what the runner actually did.

Disclaimer: AOC doesn't use none of those however that is a shame.

As an admin who has posted events in both, I won't bother anymore with the hassles of Route Gadget unless livelox start charging a lot (which is the only downside I can see). Livelox does everything better including allowing users to combine all the classes on a course together (good for large events using Meos) and simulating mass starts for each leg.

What does one do in Livelox if the map isn't georeferenced or has some places where it's a little stretched or compacted? With Routegadget, I can adjust. I don't know if this can be done in Livelox. Many of our (NEOC, northeast US) maps are older, and not to the same standards as maps being made today. The Livelox replays sometimes look confusing when someone "punches" a control when their chevron is at the edge of the control circle.

levitin: I'm not sure if this is what we are supposed to do and I've only done it twice but it has worked for me to get correctly geo-referenced maps in OCAD by going Map> Transform> Affine and adjusting the map to match a geo-referenced background image of the same area as the map.

Add map images to OMaps. If it is georeferenced it will ask you for the projection from a drop down menu. If not you can manually georeference it there against the aerial background it provides. I think the same functionality can de accessed via livelox. No need to use a mapping program. When setting up your event on Eventor, just indicate the map, import the xml file for the courses and it is sitting there waiting to activate after the indicated course closure time. All the issues with RouteGadget and javascript are history.

Yes you can georeference the map in Livelox when setting it up.

There can be issues with when a control 'pings' on the map if the bricks aren't synched but that's a course setting issue, not a Livelox one (take note Bendigo!) because it pulls the splits from the uploaded results. I don't think RouteGadget even does that at all.

There has been anti-warp purist chat here before I think, but one of our folks warped one of our pre lidar maps and it's worked great for having LiveLox make enough sense that the bulk of our audience doesn't notice issues. It's certainly within GPS accuracy, which can be nearly a trail off anyway, eg:



Those woods are white enough, but not so white anyone would seriously run between two three-meter wide trails.

https://www.livelox.com/Viewer/2021-SMOC-Fall-Huro...

Agree with TheInvisibleLog and tRicky regarding the capabilities within Livelox to georeference. I've used it on a couple of occasions with excellent results, and very easy to use.

Two questions about Livelox:
1. how easy is it to add other runners after the event (reruns, personal timing, etc.)?
2. Any concerns that the data are stored on Livelox servers? What about access if Livelox goes out of business?

I've add other folks and reruns, not bad at all. Reruns have an extra click iirc because you'd be outside the time interval, assuming you didn't do it in the time interval, but I know I've gotten around it since I've done post-event runs a day or week after for various reasons and wanted to compare.

Are we all looking at the same Routegadget site ?

Here's a link to the event we took part in last Friday ; https://www.mdoc.routegadget.co.uk/rg2/#358&co... .

If you select the "Courses" tab in the window on the left, then tick the box for course nine the course will appear. If we then tick the second box on that line all the GPS traces which were uploaded for that course will appear. I am that clown who ran right off the north end of the map. If we deselect the second tick box and select the third one you will see a simulated mass start.

If we now select the "Results" tab at the top of the window then select a random course you will see every runner on that course. Tick the course box to see the PurplePen. You can now select individual runners to compare and contrast. If the runners haven't chosen to upload a GPS track then the system assumes that they ran right along the purple line. If you weren't carrying a GPS but were pretty sure where you were than the "Draw" tab has a route wizard where you can draw a route right round your course.

When uploading a personal track it is locked to the runners splits but it can be dragged about a little bit to correct for GPS inaccuracies.

There's some stuff on here; https://www.routegadget.co.uk/about

It is used in the US ; http://rg.cascadeoc.org/rg2/ , http://www.rmoc.org/gadget/rg2/#139

I agree with comments addressing maprunner's question about ease of adding other runs that are outside of the event window. We've even added routes after an event that were recorded by the course designers before the event took place.

Question regarding Livelox's live tracking feature: does anyone have experience with directly recording their route using the Livelox app over a long period of time - think 10- to 12-hour, or longer, rogaines - to know whether the battery life of a typical smartphone will support it?

Maybe someone here knowns, how can I draw and save a route with RG2? Every time I try it save button never activates and I can't save. Last time I tried it here https://lappeenriento.fi/gadget/rg2/#205
save button never activates, no way to save. (I hiked B course, you can try drawing my route and see if you can get the button to activate). Maybe that site happens to have a buggy version of RG2?

Is this any help ?
https://www.routegadget.co.uk/docs/user-guide/draw...

Your event seems to be locked as "read only" as there is a padlock icon in the title bar.

Gps tracks can be uploaded. And now when I look at it, there are no drawn tracks in this or any of the older events, so I guess it is not just me.

From my browser, the lock symbol has now disappeared. I will try to draw a track on the event but I will have to use your route. I will write TEST in the comments box.

Go ahead. For me the save button stays inactivated and I can't press it. If it works for you it may be a language browser issue.

No, that didn't work. the whole process was fine up until the finish, but no "save" button.

Glad to hear it is not me. I guess there is a bug in the version they use. I suspected that, but since I have no idea how it is supposed to work I wasn't sure.

What it comes to adjusting gps tracks, with the latest routegadget (the 2D one, not RG2 or 3D RG or "classic routegadget" - too many routegadgets out there to follow really) you can adjust anyones saved track (afterwards) for your own analysis/ animations/comparisons. Here is example video comparing M21 and W21 runners for a common section of their courses. I made that video for illustrating the handicap tool, I added there 80% handicap to even up speeds to see better differences for hesitation or mistakes, but you can also see how gps error adjusting is made.

even up speeds

That's pretty sweet

My kingdom for LiveLox to add some sort of similar functionality. Especially at local events, the time spread is too big and fitness can dominate and make not great routes look better by virtue of being faster. You can sort of mentally do it..."this guy won by 20 minutes but was not much faster than them here..." but automatic would be nice.

I have tried to draw routes now on two older events on your Routegadget page but the save button doesn't appear on either, so it isn't just that one event.

Only 9 controls and finish, but there seems to be 11 split times, last of them is 0.
Impossible to click the very last 11th one, so save buttion never activates. Most likely results format used around here is not quite compatible with RG2 and that's why drawing option has never been working.