Mapsource Topo or City Navigator

[superflatz]

Can anyone tell me the diffeerence/similarities between topo and City Nav.? Based on recommendations here, I will be buying the 60csx. I do alot of hiking, but would also like to navigate roads. Hate to have to buy both (budget buster).

 

Thanks in advance.

bob

[nhfours]

Can anyone tell me the diffeerence/similarities between topo and City Nav.? Based on recommendations here, I will be buying the 60csx. I do alot of hiking, but would also like to navigate roads. Hate to have to buy both (budget buster).

 

Thanks in advance.

bob

Sad to say, but if you want to use your GPSr for both hiking and road navigation you almost certainly need both.

 

You absolutely need the topo maps for hiking, and they are of limited use for road navigation as they are extremely old.

[+BigLarry]

Topo maps are topographical features, like lakes, streams, trails, and altitude contour lines. Major roads are shown, but often without names.

 

City Navigator has details of street names, addresses, and autorouting information.

 

For navigating when driving a car, you need City Navigator.

For navigating out in the wilderness, you need Topo.

 

Topo is much older but still works fine since mountains don't move fast. Actually, I find the City Navigator more of a problem being out of date with missing POIs, wrong streets, etc..

[+adamthole]

You can always make your own topo maps. I make my own topo maps, with water data, for the places I hike. You can make your maps transparent, so the roads can be seen right under your topo. Here is the site I used to make my own topo:

 

http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

 

Supposedly, these home-made topos are more detailed than the ones you buy from Garmin.

[beautyisgod]

You can always make your own topo maps. I make my own topo maps, with water data, for the places I hike. You can make your maps transparent, so the roads can be seen right under your topo. Here is the site I used to make my own topo:

 

http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

 

Supposedly, these home-made topos are more detailed than the ones you buy from Garmin.

 

how long do we need to spend time on making those maps? its kind of difficult i think to make those maps

[+Bus36]

You can always make your own topo maps. I make my own topo maps, with water data, for the places I hike. You can make your maps transparent, so the roads can be seen right under your topo. Here is the site I used to make my own topo:

 

http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

 

Supposedly, these home-made topos are more detailed than the ones you buy from Garmin.

 

how long do we need to spend time on making those maps? its kind of difficult i think to make those maps

The learning curve takes a while maybe an hour or so. To actually make the maps though now once I know how it takes about maybe an hour or so to make topo maps for a county here in western pa. This involves me downloading the data, converting the tif and then making the map. If your internet connection is faster or your computer probably is faster this will take less time. Also you can look at http://mapcenter.cgpsmapper.com/. People post their maps there and I encourage others to do so. I have been posting a lot of maps for Western Pa and plan on posting some more in the near future. I would say if you had to pick one I would go with Navigator then learn how to make your own topo maps. There is a learning curve but since everything to make them is free it is only your time and effort. Plus you can get a lot of help here on the boards and the topo maps you make are better and they are transparant so you can see both topo and navigator maps.

[+briansnat]

City Navigator does autorouting (point to point directions), has most streets and database of over 5 millions services and businesses. If you need to know where the nearest gas station, hotel, restaurant (by cuisine), shopping mall, auto repair shop, barber, post office, police station, etc... are, City Navigator will tell you where it is and give you turn by turn directions to your destination. Unfortunatley City Navigator doesn't show much in the way of terrain detail. It has major lakes and rivers, but streams, minor rivers, smaller lakes aren't on it.

If you are hiking away from major roads and towns you will just see a big blank spot.

 

Mapsource Topo has contour lines that show ravines, hills, mountains and cliffs as well as most smaller streams, swamps, ponds, lakes, some older hiking trails, dirt roads and most roads (though only major ones are named).

Basically the stuff that shows on USGS maps. Mapsource Topo doesn't do autorouting or have the database of business and services. It is also out of date in some areas, as it is based on USFS maps which are notoriously out of date in many areas.

 

Here are examples of what an off road area looks like with the two:

 

Topo

 

City Select (City Navigator is similar)

 

And here are examples of what a populated area looks like with both:

 

Topo

 

City Selectbasically the same as City Navigator

Edited September 26, 2006 by briansnat

[HokieBird]

... the topo maps you make are better and they are transparant so you can see both topo and navigator maps.

 

What exactly does transparent mean? Are they superimposed on top of each other? Can someone post a screenshot?

 

Thanks.

[+Bus36]

... the topo maps you make are better and they are transparant so you can see both topo and navigator maps.

 

What exactly does transparent mean? Are they superimposed on top of each other? Can someone post a screenshot?

 

Thanks.

Here is a picture of city navigator 7 and my custom topo maps. As you can see you get to use navigator along with your topo maps. No more toggling between the two and the custom topo maps are better.

 

Edited September 26, 2006 by Bus36

[+Cache Heads]

Here is a picture of city navigator 7 and my custom topo maps. As you can see you get to use navigator along with your topo maps. No more toggling between the two and the custom topo maps are better.

 

Oh, no.... I've been trying to ignore this, but now you've gone and posted a screengrab!! As if I need yet another thing to distract me from what I'm supposed to be doing .... gotta go-- must learn how to make pretty map

Edited September 26, 2006 by Cache Heads

[+Oky777]

How big/area size can you make your custom topos ?

Edited September 27, 2006 by Oky777

[+Chaos A.D./aka Arlsdaddy]

You can always make your own topo maps. I make my own topo maps, with water data, for the places I hike. You can make your maps transparent, so the roads can be seen right under your topo. Here is the site I used to make my own topo:

 

http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

 

Supposedly, these home-made topos are more detailed than the ones you buy from Garmin.

 

3 computers and 2 web browsers...I can't get the info downloaded I give up.....

[+Team Perrito Blanco]

You can always make your own topo maps. I make my own topo maps, with water data, for the places I hike. You can make your maps transparent, so the roads can be seen right under your topo. Here is the site I used to make my own topo:

 

http://home.cinci.rr.com/creek/garmin.htm

 

Supposedly, these home-made topos are more detailed than the ones you buy from Garmin.

 

3 computers and 2 web browsers...I can't get the info downloaded I give up.....

 

The 121MB IDL Virtual Machine download was a pain. I tried for a few hours last night. I had to do it at work this morning. It only took about 2 minutes.

[+Team Perrito Blanco]

Double post. I hate when that happens.

Edited September 27, 2006 by Team Perrito Blanco

[+Bus36]

How big/area size can you make your custom topos ?

You can make them as big as you want. When I download the data from http://seamless.usgs.gov/ I do not go over the 50mb limit. This allows the tif to be converted to a mp in reasonable time. Of course my computer is slower so others might be able to do more faster. But the nice thing is you can make as many sections as you want and then load all of them into the gps. Right now I have Armstrong, Allegheny, Clarion, Butler, Jefferson counties all loaded onto my gps and am working on Forest, Venango, and Indiana. Pretty soon I will have most of Western Pa made into custom topo maps and will be able to load them all along with City navigator and garmin topos for other areas. Like I said a little bit of work to get it started but well worth it especially when you start to add in your own trails and such. I do have to say that others said it was hard so I stayed away from it for a while but got tired of garmin topos and switching back and forth so I went for it. It wasn't as bad as I expected. If you get stumped or need help just ask.

[+Team Perrito Blanco]

How big/area size can you make your custom topos ?

You can make them as big as you want. When I download the data from http://seamless.usgs.gov/ I do not go over the 50mb limit. This allows the tif to be converted to a mp in reasonable time. Of course my computer is slower so others might be able to do more faster. But the nice thing is you can make as many sections as you want and then load all of them into the gps. Right now I have Armstrong, Allegheny, Clarion, Butler, Jefferson counties all loaded onto my gps and am working on Forest, Venango, and Indiana. Pretty soon I will have most of Western Pa made into custom topo maps and will be able to load them all along with City navigator and garmin topos for other areas. Like I said a little bit of work to get it started but well worth it especially when you start to add in your own trails and such. I do have to say that others said it was hard so I stayed away from it for a while but got tired of garmin topos and switching back and forth so I went for it. It wasn't as bad as I expected. If you get stumped or need help just ask.

 

Do you create map panels? Like x minutes by y minutes in size? If so, how big?

[+Bus36]

How big/area size can you make your custom topos ?

You can make them as big as you want. When I download the data from http://seamless.usgs.gov/ I do not go over the 50mb limit. This allows the tif to be converted to a mp in reasonable time. Of course my computer is slower so others might be able to do more faster. But the nice thing is you can make as many sections as you want and then load all of them into the gps. Right now I have Armstrong, Allegheny, Clarion, Butler, Jefferson counties all loaded onto my gps and am working on Forest, Venango, and Indiana. Pretty soon I will have most of Western Pa made into custom topo maps and will be able to load them all along with City navigator and garmin topos for other areas. Like I said a little bit of work to get it started but well worth it especially when you start to add in your own trails and such. I do have to say that others said it was hard so I stayed away from it for a while but got tired of garmin topos and switching back and forth so I went for it. It wasn't as bad as I expected. If you get stumped or need help just ask.

 

Do you create map panels? Like x minutes by y minutes in size? If so, how big?

 

No what I do is zoom down and make it so I can see the counties. Then I make a box around the counties and go on. Then when you change it to 1/3 elevation at the bottom of that page you can change the download to different mb and I pick 50. This usually separates the county I just made into 4 sections so then I work with each section. You can see some of my maps at mapcenter to get an idea of area that I work with. Usually I download the waterways as counties so some of my maps around the edges don't have the waterways since you have to use a square but that is alright since I usually do other counties around my area then get the waterways. I find that if you go over 50mb then it takes to long. I also use 20 feet for my smallest contours so if you go smaller than this you might want to work with smaller map segments. I would just try several sizes and see what works best on your computer since yours probably will run faster than mine.

[+Klatch]

How much GPSr map storage space does each transparent county topo require, on average? Sorry if I missed that somewhere in the thread.

[+Bus36]

How much GPSr map storage space does each transparent county topo require, on average? Sorry if I missed that somewhere in the thread.

 

It depends on how large the map is. I will give you a few examples. Transparent county topo for Jefferson County here is Pa is about 4mb and transparent county topo for Clarion county is about 3mb. If you are doing transparent trails for maps they are very small lets say 50kb.

[+Klatch]

How much GPSr map storage space does each transparent county topo require, on average? Sorry if I missed that somewhere in the thread.

 

It depends on how large the map is. I will give you a few examples. Transparent county topo for Jefferson County here is Pa is about 4mb and transparent county topo for Clarion county is about 3mb. If you are doing transparent trails for maps they are very small lets say 50kb.

I just uploaded my first "home made" topo segment to my GPSr (using MapSource). Everything worked as advertised, after many false starts due to typos and misunderstanding the directions. Thank you very much, I know it will go much smoother in the future!

 

Edit: I was not able to use the USGS site with Firefox, was forced to downgrade to IE!

Edited September 28, 2006 by Klatch

[+jacobsen1]

 

Edit: I was not able to use the USGS site with Firefox, was forced to downgrade to IE!

 

Get the "IE tab" for FF... Right click a link -> "open in IE tab"... The no worries...

[+Bus36]

How much GPSr map storage space does each transparent county topo require, on average? Sorry if I missed that somewhere in the thread.

 

It depends on how large the map is. I will give you a few examples. Transparent county topo for Jefferson County here is Pa is about 4mb and transparent county topo for Clarion county is about 3mb. If you are doing transparent trails for maps they are very small lets say 50kb.

I just uploaded my first "home made" topo segment to my GPSr (using MapSource). Everything worked as advertised, after many false starts due to typos and misunderstanding the directions. Thank you very much, I know it will go much smoother in the future!

 

Edit: I was not able to use the USGS site with Firefox, was forced to downgrade to IE!

Glad to hear it. After the first one it is all downhill

[rray6]

WOW! This is some great information. Thanks. I plan to try building my own maps soon and will report on my progress. If I hit a bump, I'll be back for advice.

 

rray6

[+Bus36]

WOW! This is some great information. Thanks. I plan to try building my own maps soon and will report on my progress. If I hit a bump, I'll be back for advice.

 

rray6

If you hit a bump in the road or need some help let me know. I am not an expert but am getting a better understanding of the process and have made a lot of maps of western pa so far and some maps of trails.

[beautyisgod]

WOW! This is some great information. Thanks. I plan to try building my own maps soon and will report on my progress. If I hit a bump, I'll be back for advice.

 

rray6

If you hit a bump in the road or need some help let me know. I am not an expert but am getting a better understanding of the process and have made a lot of maps of western pa so far and some maps of trails.

 

well i am trying to learn how to make a map and there is so much info that is given...i dont know where to begin...well so far I got the IDL 6.3 program install...and like there are more programms do download and files...so whats next?

 

so right now i am in Geobase and i did register...but what do i do next? i am in canada...so i need places from toronto, ontario...which maps or stuff i should download? lost...i want to download the 1:50,000

[+Bus36]

WOW! This is some great information. Thanks. I plan to try building my own maps soon and will report on my progress. If I hit a bump, I'll be back for advice.

 

rray6

If you hit a bump in the road or need some help let me know. I am not an expert but am getting a better understanding of the process and have made a lot of maps of western pa so far and some maps of trails.

 

well i am trying to learn how to make a map and there is so much info that is given...i dont know where to begin...well so far I got the IDL 6.3 program install...and like there are more programms do download and files...so whats next?

 

so right now i am in Geobase and i did register...but what do i do next? i am in canada...so i need places from toronto, ontario...which maps or stuff i should download? lost...i want to download the 1:50,000

You best bet is to start small. Find a small area that you want to start with and do so. The smaller it is the easier it will be for you since the programs will work faster.