The first edition of the rally roadbook has arrived a few days ago.  Great reading material, funny and informative.  In less than one month we will be on the road again, the fever of excitement is rising.
In parallel we are preparing the maps. We will use Android tablets as the main navigation tool this year, they have much better displays than GPSes and are smaller and easier to use than laptops. I tried a lot of different navigation apps, most of them, even those which are not free of charge, are crap. Finally OruxMaps emerged as the winner of the contest, highly recommended if you are into geocaching.
During the last nights I prepared a nice set of maps:

• Russian military maps last updated in the 80s, but still providing the most details (the main alternatives have not been updated since WW2)
• Satellite images (you are not allowed to download Google Earth images, but there are other sources, just search on the Internet for offline satellite images). The ones I found have a resolution of around 10m!
• And finally Open StreetMap for the cities.

OruxMaps allows to easily switch between them and automatically loads the next map if you leave the area covered by one.

This is just to test a script which automatically forwards e-mails to our blog.Embedded images don’t work, but for text its OK.