Normally, you don't want to use a smartphone's GPS to produce data for the public's consumption. A dedicated hand GPS is a simpler device. It's power is only committed (for the most part) to one function. But a smartphone has a CPU, random access memory, internal and perhaps external storage. It has an antenna for calling, text and data. Then it has hardware for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a much larger screen and then it's GPS antenna. The smartphone's power is more diverted than a dedicated hand GPS. In comparison, it's as energy efficient as the dedicated device can be. And with all this stuff being "crammed" in one form, it's likely that any given hand GPS has a larger antenna? On the internal side of things, that alone goes a long way to making tracks and waypoints more accurate.
The other considerations are usually atmospheric. For instance, the sky needs to be partly sunny or better in order to accurately record GPS positions. And very best time to record these is at night under a clear sky. This is because the sun is not out causing interference in the upper atmosphere with the satellite reception. However, that' not usually an option with distance trail volunteers. On-road, you might not want to be caught "lurking around" while trying to get a fix on a location. And night hiking is slow, more strenuous and there are plenty of tripping hazards.
Hikers, really don't need to worry about this. With a 15,000mAh power bank, they can extend the length of their smartphone usage by as much as 9 days on airplane mode. But the power banks are known to be heavy, so there's a trade off that should be theirs to consider.
I started photo cataloging the Road Fork and Whipple Sections of the Buckeye Trail (North Country concurrent). It's a project that's output would mostly be consumed internally. The photos are geotagged, which means that when you use 3rd party software, it produces a waypoint in Google Earth with the pictures embedded in them. And those waypoints are positioned according to the global coordinates that were recorded by the camera. Smartphone's have the capability. First the "locater" must be enabled for GPS functions. Then as a safety, it has to be enabled in the camera's settings as well.
Considering the volunteerism that I've done with this project so far, I can say that the battery in my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 SM-N950U will last for 3 miles one way on hilly and curvy trail if a picture was taken at every blaze. I have a 5,000mAh power bank that should get me 3 miles out and back. Then today, I remembered that my laptop has a USB port that is always on. I don't know if it's always on on battery mode, but if it is and I get an anti-static sealing bag for it, I might be able to "steal," or transfer power from it's battery to the smartphone's?
The last one that I did was 2.2 miles in one direction and I took 204 geotagged photos at 16:9 picture ratio, which is at about 9.1 megabytes per file. The total project is estimated to be about 3,340 photos and be 29 gigabytes in hard disk size. Right now, I'm having concerns about the thumbnails used in Google Earth. That application can only handle 400 megabytes of data at once. So with the data being broken down between map points, the total file size can't be more than 200 megabytes. Seeing to this, while keeping the photos at adequate at quality might be challenging? But actually being out and doing this was actually easier than I originally thought.
I am a volunteer with the Buckeye Trail Association. I volunteer with a functions under the executive staff. I'm a non-voting member of the Trail Management Team. And I'm volunteer supervisor of the Whipple Section. I usually contribute to it's Facebook group daily.
In 3rd party to that, I lead the Adventurer's Project. We don't have a corp of officers yet. Things are very new, so most of it is run by me still. I'm the admin of it's Facebook page and usually contribute to it daily. With all it's functions combined, my being the only one isn't the way it should be. Maybe you might call me a "Super Volunteer" because I'm more of an "orange" than an apple. I want Adventurer's Project's volunteerism to be measured more by them's than me's. In fact, there's no measurement.
If you have a moment, please like Adventurer's Project on Facebook.
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