Old 05-30-07, 03:25 AM
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Alex L
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Originally Posted by skookum
I'm not geeky enough to follow all that, but are you saying you can make your own maps from google earth and USGS topos and load them into your Garmin GPSr?
I would like to know ephemeralskin’s opinion on that too. In particular on this: “…a huge jpg ready to be plugged into mapping software and exported to my gps unit. i think thats just great.”
In other words: “5)using the map editing programs you need to eventually get from raster images (photos, scanned maps, etc) and other data input (topographical info, etc) to a vector image (line and point based image).”
That means you need to draw a vector image manually, doing a copy of a raster image and then to save it as a vector image file. This is mapping software is used for. IMO sounds not optimistic at all, because I think the job takes a lot of time. There are object recognition programs like EasyTrace, R2V, WinTOPO to do it automatically, however the result is still not perfect.

So I don’t see any way how to use calibrated raster images (scanned or google earth) with garmin mappable receivers.

Probably the US, Canada and Western Europe are well covered by high quality commercial vector maps. As to the other world, the mapping function of a gpsr IMO is still useless, for bike touring at least. We have garmin maps of Russia here. They are too expensive and only “base detailed” (means no forests, and no local roads). To add some non-garmin map to the receiver looks like a hacking process. That is very poor to compare with wide-available calibrated well-detailed raster maps of almost all Russian regions on DVD for $10. That is why a gpsr with mapping is still not my choice.

Nevertheless, how can we see us on our detailed bike routes atlas or a space shot of the area? I don’t know another way but to use a PDA with a gpsr module or connected to a gpsr, which supports NMEA protocol. OziExplorer program is all you need. Of course, one must be careful because PDA is not an outdoor device and should not be on all the time to save power. I also turn off the display lighting.

Last edited by Alex L; 06-06-07 at 02:58 AM.
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