Technical

Welcome to the Blog

Welcome to the PitStopper.net blog! Here you'll find tips for planning better routes, stories from the community, feature announcements, and guides to help you get the most out of your adventures. Whether you're bikepacking across continents or planning a local day hike, we've got something for you.

What Counts as a U-turn?

September 9, 2026 8 min read

Technical

Our turn generator kept calling ordinary sharp corners u-turns. Fixing it needed two measurements rather than one, and taught me that the plain u-turn symbol is not a vaguer version of u-turn left. It means something different.
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Compare GPX Tracks: Check a Conversion Against the Recording It Came From

September 7, 2026 10 min read

Features Technical

How do you tell whether a track-to-route conversion is any good? In the end by looking at it - but the hard part is knowing where to look. Two lines are indistinguishable at any zoom that fits them both on screen, and the places that matter are a hundred metres long. So here is a tool that does the hunting: compare-tracks.html takes an original plus up to two conversions and reports every stretch where they part company, which OpenStreetMap ways each line is on, and whether the turn instructions agree. Here is one thing it found, and the thing it missed.
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Track to Route: Convert a Recorded GPS Track into a Turn-by-Turn Route (Alpha)

September 4, 2026 18 min read

Features Technical

You rode something good and the GPS wrote down roughly where you went. New in PitStopper (Alpha): a track to route converter. Match to Roads matches your recorded GPX or FIT track to the OpenStreetMap road network, redraws it along the roads you actually used, and turns it into a turn-by-turn route you can navigate in Cruiser or Locus Map. Here is what it does, what it will not do, and where it still trips up.
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The Navigation Hidden in Your GPX: Turn Cues, Viapoints and Surface

July 27, 2026 11 min read

Features Technical

Open most GPX files and you get a line on a map: latitude, longitude, maybe elevation. But some tracks carry far more - turn cues, named viapoints and surface notes, tucked inside the trackpoints themselves. Most tools throw all of that away on import. PitStopper now keeps it, shows it, and writes it back out intact.
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Your Route, Already Loaded

July 12, 2026 5 min read

Technical Product

We built a quiet prefetch that runs while you're taking in the route. After about 2-3 seconds, all 70-odd built-in POI categories are fetched and cached at a 1km radius - turning a one-per-search network cost into a once-per-load cost, and the radius slider into a pure local control.
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POI Searches Just Got Up To 20× Faster

July 11, 2026 9 min read

Technical News

Searching for POIs along a long route used to mean firing off dozens of Overpass queries - and on routes like London to Edinburgh, a search that might never finish. As of today, searches run on a new PostGIS-backed engine that answers the whole route in a single indexed query. Here's what changed, the numbers, and how we got there.
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The Case of the Zero-Kilometre Course Points

June 30, 2026 13 min read

Technical

A few users reported that their GPX waypoints all imported into Garmin Connect at "0 km from the start" - in the right place on the map, but with no distance. We built a pile of test files to find out why, and the answer turned out to be a single, undocumented number.
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Why Garmin Connect Deletes Your Waypoints (and How We Fixed It with the help of a PitStopper user)

June 6, 2026 7 min read

Features Technical

You carefully place a cafe stop or water point in PitStopper, send the file to your Garmin, and it vanishes. A PitStopper user worked out why - and here is the new export feature that stops it.
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Map Layer Improvements: More Options and Faster Loading

January 22, 2026 2 min read

Features Technical

New Hillshade and Terrain map layers give you more ways to visualize your routes, while our self-hosted tile cache delivers faster, more reliable map loading.
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Faster POI Lookups: Our Own Overpass Server

January 14, 2026 4 min read

Technical News

We're excited to announce a major infrastructure improvement: PitStopper now runs its own Overpass server, resulting in faster and more reliable POI searches for all users.
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Behind the Scenes: A Cleaner Codebase for Faster Features

January 5, 2026 2 min read

Technical News

PitStopper looks and works exactly the same, but under the hood we've completely reorganised our code. Here's why that matters for you.
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Understanding Time Estimation in PitStopper

November 25, 2025 6 min read

Tutorials Technical

How does PitStopper know how long your trip will take? We explain GPX timestamps, our gradient-adjusted speed model, and when you should use your route planner's timing instead.
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How PitStopper Uses Public APIs

November 21, 2025 4 min read

Technical

Learn how PitStopper leverages public APIs for POI data, elevation, and maps - all while keeping your route data private in your browser.
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