Is Meridian Gold basemap off?

[+Trango]

I have been noticing something that concerned me at first, but now I just want to know others are seeing something similar.

 

When travelling down the road with my MeriGold zoomed all the way in, I am pretty consistantly off of the road by about 50 ft. When in the car we run almost exactly parallel to the road. At first I thought it might be an accuracy thing with the GPS (although it was strange that it was so consistantly off), but yesterday, as I was out, I had placed a waypoint based on a USGS map. The point displayed on the unit way off the basemap road (and to the wrong side), but when I watched the track, we went right through the middle of the waypoint.

 

Have others noticed similar things with their basemap, or is this just a Hawai`i thing? If I load up the detailed maps, will I have a similar problem, or are those maps better coordinated? I have not had a chance to see if I get similar results on the mainland. I was just relived to see that it was the basemap that is off and not the GPS.

[peter]

Sounds perfectly normal. Remember that the basemap has to cover a huge area with a limited amount of memory. Compared to the detailed maps, the memory requirements are reduced in three ways: 1) smaller streets aren't included at all; 2) turns aren't drawn with as many points so they don't follow the actual road shape as well; and 3) the vector description of the road doesn't have as much precision (fewer decimal places).

 

The detailed maps will be better, but still far from perfect in many cases. MapSend appears to be based on the US Census Bureau's TIGER maps which were made good enough for the census takers to find their way around, but are not up to current GPS standards.

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I second Peter. I've noticed our position indicator drift off the road. My navigator (Chris) likes to call it "GPS Boondockin". Within a city with closely packed streets, it can be annoying. However, I've yet to see two technologies merge perfectly.