Some thoughts on my outdoor gear

Outdoor Gear Army Style Crusader Mug

For my walk today I packed my Crusader Mug and Vargo meths stove outdoor gear rather than carrying my backpacking cookset which I usually take. I took the Crusader mug with me camping last week, which reminded me how useful it is as a pot/mug.

Above – some of my outdoor gear, the Crusader mug and lid, the Footloose bag that holds my compact cooking kit and the red brew kit pouch (see below)

The Crusader mug is outdoor gear made for the Army – it is well made, tough and practical.

When I use the titanium Alpkit MiTiMug for cooking it seems no matter how much I stir the food there is always some of it burnt on the bottom of the pot. It is the thin titanium that allows the food to heat and burn too quickly. Last week when I was cooking in the Crusader mug, with regular stirring it was easier the keep food from burning. The thicker steel of the military mug reduces the problem. The steel gives a better heat distribution so making cooking easier. I have fried bacon, sausages and made scrambled eggs in the steel mug something that I would not do in the titanium one.

When camping this year I am going to use the Crusader mug more. However the one issue with Crusader, when compared to the MiTiMug is the weight. When backpacking the ultra light titanium mug/pot wins every time.

Tea

I have found that a small pouch that holds the basics of a brew kit, (tea bags and dried milk as a minimum) is a useful bit of outdoor gear to keep at hand. Going on any trip, camping, backpacking or even a business trip or hotel holiday, carrying these supplies has proved useful.

The first kit I can remember was a small draw string pouch that I had made and the dried milk was kept in a recycled brown plastic medicine bottle. (I am not sure we used the term recycled then!) Over the years I have used various bottles and different pouches but the brew kit has been a constant piece of equipment – and here is the latest version: Click here.

I have changed it again.

When I was packing away last weekend I accidently spilt some water onto the pouch – which soaked it up like a sponge and proved very difficult to dry out. Because of this I have changed to a plastic pouch that I hope will provide better protection. This is still pocket sized but it is slightly larger than the previous one, so I have added a sauce sachet and some extra coffee.

Power Pack

I am a heavy user of my iPhone. When outdoors I use it for map reading/GPS, writing this blog, taking and editing photographs, reading ebooks etc etc etc. This means keeping it charged is an issue. When I have my car with me I can plug it into the cigarette lighter socket or use the power inverter and the mains charger but when I do not have the car, I need another plan.

In my outdoor gear I have an emergency 2Ah battery pack (in my possibles pouch) and a 10Ah Battery Pack. I often use the 10Ah pack when camping with my car to charge my gadgets in the tent overnight. It does not weigh so much that I will not carry it on some overnight backpacking trips – I carried it on my last walk to Woodhall Spa so I had enough power to watch video during the evening.

Before going to Sandringham last week I plugged the charger in, the lights flashed “oddly” and jammed on. It had obviously failed in some way, so I was no longer willing to plug my gadgets into this power pack. After a quick look on eBay I found a 20Ah unit for less money than I had paid for the 10Ah pack – so I bought it.

The new unit has several advantages over the last one:

• Obviously it has twice the power storage!
• It has two USB ports, 5v at 1A and 5v at 2.1A.
• Two devices can be charged at once.
• My iPad can be charged from the 2.1A socket.

This power pack fits in the same case as the old one, although the 20Ah pack is a little larger and weighs 322g compared with 254g. The protective case weighs 101g so if I need to save some weight I can carry the it in a ziplock bag.

MP3 Player

To help preserve the battery life on my phone I have used an 8GB Apple iPod Nano, as part of my outdoor gear, for entertainment whilst walking and camping. Diana bought it for me whilst I was practice walking for the Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk in 2007 but by the spring of 2014 the battery had faded.

HTC Wildfire S

Outdoor gear MP3 player – listening to Robert Heinlein

We bought Jeremy an iPhone a couple of weeks ago and so he no longer needed his old phone – so I thought I would see if I could make a useable MP3 player from it.

The Wildfire S is very limited in internal memory, 256MB, but I installed a 16GB memory card for extra storage. On my first build I managed to fill the memory having added only a couple of apps as some of the installed apps could not be moved to the card.

A search of the internet gave me a patch for the firmware to allow me to move (nearly) all the apps I wanted to the card – it did not work for DropBox. I factory reset the phone and started again.

The first step was to disable the Mobile Network and then set the phone into Airplane Mode.  By turning on the wifi (whilst in Aiplane Mode) I could get online and install the apps I wanted. As part of this initial process I upgraded to Google Play, but did not upgrade any of the pre-installed apps.

I copied some music and audiobooks to the storage card and tried it out and the HTC Wildfire S makes a good MP3 player – with extras. It has wifi so I can get onto the internet.

I have installed:

• Aldiko for ebooks
• AntennaPod for podcasts
• Google Drive and OneDrive (but not DropBox) to get access to books, audio books and music I store online
• Memory Map and the full UK OS 50k map set
• WordPress app
• Twitter

These were the must have apps. I also added Google’s QuickOffice so I could at least look at Word or Excel files – I am not sure the screen is large enough or sensitive enough to do any major work on.

The Wildfire S also has a built in FM radio.

Jeremy had taken care of the phone so both the screen and battery were in good condition. I have added a screen protector – I cut down one I had in my desk for a previous PDA. I have replaced the 1.2Ah battery with a 2.5Ah model from eBay, keeping the smaller battery as a spare.

Overall this old phone will make a good replacement for my iPod and it gives me much more functionality. Using it as an ebook reader will have a great impact on my iPhone battery life, as I read a lot and have had to accept that battery usage, now I will save that. The battery life on the Wildfire is very reasonable when not using it as a phone or on wifi – if I carry a charge cable I can recharge the Wildfire from the Power Pack.