Scanning Own Maps?

[+dhbaird]

Hello folks...

 

I have some very detailed hiking maps from a couple of outing clubs that show trails on them. I want to have access to those trail maps on both my PDA and my GPS. I have not found any track/route data sites with these particular trails so far and I am beginning to think that I will need to scan them and do the conversion project myself. Hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew!

 

What software do I need to scan those maps, calibrate them and them upload them to a GPS?

 

I have ordered Rich Owings' book GPS Mapping but I wanted to get a jump on looking at the software while I was waiting for the book to come in.

 

I will be interfacing with a Garmin GPSMAP 76cs and have Garmin Topo and Delorme Topo already here.

 

Thanks

[Neo_Geo]

Check Out:

cGPSmapper

Map Authoring

Ozi Explorer

GPSTrackMaker

MapDekode

[stevesisti]

Hello folks...

 

I have some very detailed hiking maps from a couple of outing clubs that show trails on them. I want to have access to those trail maps on both my PDA and my GPS. I have not found any track/route data sites with these particular trails so far and I am beginning to think that I will need to scan them and do the conversion project myself. Hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew!

 

What software do I need to scan those maps, calibrate them and them upload them to a GPS?

 

I have ordered Rich Owings' book GPS Mapping but I wanted to get a jump on looking at the software while I was waiting for the book to come in.

 

I will be interfacing with a Garmin GPSMAP 76cs and have Garmin Topo and Delorme Topo already here.

 

Thanks

It depends on how involved you want to get...I have made an overlay for use on my 60CS. It's transparent, details rivers, streams, lakes and topo, and it overlays city select7 maps. Thats fairly easy because all the overlay info is already vectorized and available from the NY State GIS clearinghouse. Using some of the programs mentioned in Rich's book, it's fairly simple to make a nice custom map. The overlay I made covers 63 SQ mi., and only uses 146K of map memory to enable me to get both street detail and topo detail.

 

If it's the trails you're interested in, the simplest thing to do would be to ask the outing club how they arrived at the trail data...if they arrived at it from a GPS track, it's easiest to ask if they would mind giving you the track info, and just incorporate that into the std. garmin product as a track.

 

If that info is not available your only choice is to scan and calibrate the map using any one of a number of different programs. Once you have a calibrated map you can simply just trace the track with a program like Oziexplorer (or others) and convert into a Garmin compatible track that you can load to the GPS. You can go further and make your own map from scratch, incorporating and making the track an integral part of the map....you should be advised that you'd better like this mapping stuff because it certainly takes a lot of time to make one from scratch.There is a lot of "free" data floating around in the GIS world, but you need to be aware of all the different datum and projections...it's easy to think you have incoroprated data into your mapset, only to find it's geographically out of position.

 

I suspect rich's book would make things easier than the "trial and error" path I have gone down, but experimenting with different map data sets helps you get a feel for what you want to include in your map.

 

As far as getting a jump on things...I would just wait for the book, theres an awful lot you must familiarize yourself with before making the map.

 

Best of Luck