Topofusion or Birdseye?

[Braff-n-MandaRue]

I recently purchased a Etrex 20. I've been playing around putting extra maps on it. Making my on KMZ maps and those types of things.

 

I've been contemplating purchasing either Topofusion or Birdseye to aid in adding additional maps to the GPS.

 

If I bought Birdseye, I'd want to purchase both the aerial imagery and TOPO maps. So, it's close in price to purchasing Topofusion Pro.

 

With topofusion, the program creates KMZ files and loads them directly to the GPS. The color aerial images with Topofusion also appear to be more up to date in my area than the Birdseye imagery

 

Birdseye is more proprietary and should work better with the GPS.

 

I just don't know yet, and was wondering if anyone else has some good experience.

 

As of right now I'm leaning a little more toward Topofusion, because the program has some extra features I like over Basecamp.

[+dfx]

Personally I'd go for Birdseye, simply because the KMZ support is very limited. With Birdseye, you can quickly cover very large areas with good quality imagery, but with KMZ you can only do either small areas or low resolution stuff in one go.

 

Also personally I would use vector-based topo maps rather than raster maps. But I'm sure you have your reasons not to.

[+coggins]

You will be able to load more BirdsEye data to your GPS that you can with Topofusion.

[Braff-n-MandaRue]

I thought about being able to load larger areas using birdseye. My thoughts with that are, I can only be so many places at one time. So, I don't usually load very large areas at once. Although, it would be nice on larger trips.

 

I have the older 100k Garmin Topos, and several 24k maps from GPSfiledepot that I use, so I'm familiar with and use vector maps. The reason for wanting to use a raster map is to have something on my GPS that matches the USGS paper maps that I carry with me. I also realize you can download digital maps from the USGS site and convert them, but if someone else has already done the work, I'd rather just use that.