Newbie Needs Help

[stouffej]

Sorry if this sounds like such an elementary question but here goes... I just purchased the 60CSx in preparation for a hiking trip to Kauai. I understand the basics of GPS but have no idea about what maps would best suit my needs for hiking through the Waimea Canyon. Can anyone lend some guidance on what maps I should be using. I see lots of people posting about custom maps too. Am I better off buying an off the shelf topo map for my Garmin? Even a link to a tutorial website would be great. Thanks.

 

Jim

[rwolf]

Here is the detail from Garmin Topo just to give you an idea of what to expect.

 

[+imajeep]

For general hiking use, Garmin 1:100K Topo maps. For National Parks, Garmin 1:24K National Park Topo Maps. The 100K maps don't have trails on them, but the 24K maps do have major trails. Both sets of maps are driven by the Garmin MapSource application, which is supplied with both sets.

 

You also may want to use a site like Trails.com or Topozone.com. These sites have online topo maps and arial photoz that sow more detail than the Garmin topos. They also let you plot a route and export the route in a GPX file. You can load the route into MapSource, which imports GPX files, and from there you can download it to your handheld.

 

I like ExpertGPS (http://expertgps.com) for route plotting. There's a full-feature demo available on line. You can plot routes on a scanned topo, or on an arial photo. Note that the topos from ExpertGPS can't be loaded intoi MapSource or downloaded to the unit. Only Garmin topos can be used for that. So, I use ExpertGPS to plot a route, export the route as a GPX file, then import the route into MapSource for downloading to my handheld. The route is an overlay on my Garmin topos, which I can use for navigation in the handheld.