Quirk in Metro Guide

[+jollybgood]

This is more amusing than a complaint. I was asked to be a special guest at a convention in Plymouth, New Hampshire recently so when they offered to fly me out I told them I'd rather drive. (1100 miles from Chicago). Why?

So I could take a few days to cache-hop from state to state.

 

Anyway, my GPSV performed amazingly well. It auto-routed me down back roads, over mountains (literally) and through forests dark.

 

On the last cache I hit in Vermont I punched in Plymouth New Hampshire from the Metroguide source maps (I had already loaded the maps for most of vermont and new hampshire. And off I went as it took me down back roads and two lane highways toward my destination.

 

Finally I got within a mile of Plymouth and I began to draw concern. (I've never been to plymouth). I was on a gravel road winding my way up a mountain side (a logging road from what I can tell). Finally I reached the summit to find a circlular drive with a huge boulder in the middle. This was Plymouth New Hampshire?

 

After studying my paper maps and road atlas and fidgeting with my GPSV I finally realized my faithful GPS unit had failed me. I was 3 miles off course.

 

Later after telling a friend at the convention what happened he laughed.

 

"You must have been on top of Plymouth Mountain!"

 

Apparently Metroguide's POI is wrong. It has plymouth mountain listed as a 'small town'.

 

Has anyone else reported errors like this? Fortunately in this case it was only off 3 miles so the REAL plymouth wasn't that far off. But what if it had been 50 miles?

 

Otherwise my GPSV is amazing. The last two days I've discovered some pretty interesting places.

 

Jolly R. Blackburn

http://img.Groundspeak.com/user/26453_300.jpg

[peter]

I have an eMap rather than the V, but I believe you were actually seeing the inaccuracy of the basemap rather than any error in MG. The default when finding a city is to use the basemap data, and the basemap on mine places the town of Plymouth very near (but not actually on) the little loop in Summit Rd. that you found. However, the MG maps show the nominal location of the town to be almost 1.2 miles to the northeast and very close to the Post Office.

 

On the eMap, if you hit MENU when searching for the city name you can select to use the MG maps rather than the basemap default. I presume the V has a similar function. Having the basemap as the default is usually reasonable since it lets you find cities whether or not you have loaded the appropriate detailed maps. And most of the time people doing a find on a cityname rather than a specific address or POI are just looking for the general area not an exact location.