pandagirl

Check out Basher_boy's log August 4th on Hook Challenge http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=9822 Great pics but it sure did scare the pee-pee out of me and Basher_boy We continued on but boy we were sure careful.

Check out Basher_boy's log August 4th on Hook Challenge http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.asp?ID=9822 Great pics but it sure did scare the pee-pee out of me and Basher_boy We continued on but boy we were sure careful.

Can anyone explian why a piece of software can't be written that would alow the export of data from MS Streets and Trips to the GPSr of your choice

I am going to chime in here. The topic is a little bit different, but I thought it would fit in here. I have been using National Geography’s Topo to help me find caches. It is a ~$100 piece of software that contains the USGA 7.5 maps on about 10 CD-ROMs. It is really as good or better then I could expect from digital media. I am one of the few of out there that believe that by digitizing data we will always be degrading the quality of the data. This is not to say that digital info cannot be good enough, but it is rarely as good as data of the analogue source. Take topo for instance. Compare a bitmapped image from Topo, to the 7.5 min quadrangle that the image was bitmapped from. To the discerning eye there will be no contest. At the same time I can have 10 CD-ROMS and a laptop and have access to an entire map cabinet worth of analogue topo maps, pretty handy, and good enough (most of the time) for me to do what I need to do. Now compare that program to Delorme’s Topo USA, which I recently bought. This is a collection of eight CD-ROMS that have contain the topo maps for the entire USA for ~$60. This software made every bit as pretty maps as on the box, and was praised till the ends of the earth on the Internet. I found it all but useless for land navigation uses. Most of the landmarks that one relies on from the USGS maps are no where to be found, and beyond a rough approximation of topography, and a not so accurate rendering of streets the CDs contained no more info. Now again this contains the whole of the USA on the space that five states are contained on the National Geographic Set. I was very disappointed with Delorme’s software. It was touted all over the net as the end all be all of topo software, and I don’t think that anyone could use it to navigate from my house to the bottom of the driveway. Delorme got their software right back. I point this out because I was disappointed in the previous consumers who wrote reviews for the Topo USA. I don’t know how they could have been so happy with it. Maybe these folks have never seen or used a topo map, so they really can’t know what is expected. I think many consumers don’t realize how much information is lost in the digitization process. Portability, ease, and compactness are gained, but a lot is traded for that. From what I am reading here in this thread the concept of putting maps onto a GPSr is even more useless than I thought it would be. I have yet to buy a GPS and was going to purchase one of the fancy big memory type units, but it looks like I would be better off with a bottom of the line model, and carry a paper copy of the maps I need.