good topo software for macintosh

[Daniel Schmidt]

Any suggestions for good topo software to be used on a mac for printing out maps as well as gps routes? There are many reviews online for the national geos on mac that are pretty bad.

[Douglas Frick]

I’ve been using National Geographic’s Topo! state maps for several years with my Garmin eTrex Legend and GPSmap 60C. This is the best Mac software I’ve found (and PC too, for that matter). I print sections of 7.5′ quads to carry with me on my hikes, occasionally save routes to the GPS (did this last week for skiing a trail that was covered by snow), and I load my GPS waypoints and tracks into Topo! when I get back from a trip.

The quads are often quite old, but that’s the fault of the USGS; I’ve checked and never found a fresher map from any of the commercial map vendors. I have, however, found maps that were much older from other map software vendors (DeLorme) and all of the free on-line sources. NG’s new version of Topo! has support for downloading updated topo quads.

At $100/state, Topo! states aren’t cheap (you can get them cheaper on eBay, but for now those are the older version of the program), but other PC-based quad-mapping software is similar in price. Don’t buy NG Back Roads Explorer for cross-country hiking; the resolution isn’t good enough (1:100,000).

I started by cutting and pasting maps from the free on-line sources, but this is a real pain in the butt. I also have Terrabrowser <http://www.chimoosoft.com/terrabrowser.html&gt;, but it’s not as easy to use and has fewer features. The maps (from Terraserver) are also more likely to be out of date, as with all on-line topo databases. I’ve also used Garmin MapSource on the PC (available for Mac this year) but the resolution is no better than NG’s BRE. I used DeLorme Topo USA 4 and 5 on the PC; it was horrible.

The new Mac version (just released) has a 3D feature, but my experience with this in Backs Roads Explorer 3D was very poor, and I’m hoping they improve it quickly. I haven’t yet upgraded to the new Mac version; I’m trying to decide whether to buy another state or wait for the Mac updater CD.

For an example of a trail system map that I made from my GPS tracks, see <http://www.lava.net/~dfrick/misc/HonoluluMauka.pdf&gt;. This was produced by printing to PDF, but I turned off the collars; normally, you would see the UTM or lat-lon annotations on the sides (by the red dashed lines). I also turned on light shading. In NG Topo!, the trail names and distances pop up when you mouse over them, and for this map I’ve hyperlinked them to Na Ala Hele’s trail descriptions.

I found this, which I posted in November:
NG Topo! provides 7.5′ (1:24,000) USGS topo quads for the entire state (plus 1:100,000 and 1:500,000 for continental US states; AK and HI are different). These are the graphic equivalent of paper maps I would recommend for cross-country travel, since they show surface features as well as contours. It’s easy to trace out routes for a quick elevation review or to print on a map, it’s easy to load routes and waypoints to and from my Garmin (serial) GPSr, and it’s especially easy to print the maps I want, at the scale I want, without stitching together TIFF files or screen snapshots. It also allows me to easily save sketched trails, notes, and other stuff for reference on future trips. I’ve found that NG’s topo maps are often more recent than the topo maps on the free sites (15 years newer in some cases). Whether it’s worth $75/state depends on what your time and effort is worth, I guess. I use free USGS quads too, but mostly for states I don’t have in NG Topo!. Here’s a map I made with NG Topo! (the numbered patches are live links to my map annotations). [Note: this is a high-res PDF, which is what you’d get if you printed the map; includes collars.]

http://www.lava.net/~dfrick/misc/HonoluluMaukaTOPO.pdf

Here is the same area in Garmin MapSource. These are the highest resolution contours available in MapSource.

http://www.lava.net/~dfrick/misc/HonoluluMaukaMS.pdf

There are no UTM collars on MapSource’s printed maps; it’s just what you see on the screen. You can poke in waypoints and routes in MapSource, but I use NG Topo! for that. The sole advantage of MapSource is that you can load these contours (not just waypoints and routes) into a Garmin GPSr; the GPSr’s built-in database only has roads and other objects. No other product can load contour data into a Garmin GPSr. These contours on a tiny GPSr screen aren’t really useful for cross-country navigation [Note: they sure were handy when my paper maps blew away in a blizzard several weeks ago!], but they certainly help when you’re trying to get a quick orientation or are sketching a route from a trail book.

[Brian James]

How about the same question, but for Canada?

Mapping solutions for Mac in Canada anyone? What are people using?

I’m still using my Silva Ranger from half my life ago, but on the wet coast you can walk a long way off course (read: half a day) before you get a chance to take a sighting. Some of these new Sirf Star III-equipped GPSes look promising for our rainforest-like cover but the other two pieces of my equation are a) macintosh, and b) canada.

I never did do things the easy way!

Brian

[Douglas Frick]

Good luck. I haven’t found any free topo maps for Canada. However, Garmin’s MapSource is available:

<http://www.garmin.com/cgi-bin/mapgen/webmap.cgi?p=3407873&z=1&w=480&h=360&rz=0&k=1&sc=1&gt;

and here is another resource I bookmarked a while ago.

http://www.pocketgps.co.uk/Topo-Canada.php

[Bob Gabbart]

Any thoughts on NG Topo vs MapTech

http://www.maptech.com/land/terrainnavigator/index.cfm?infopg=buy

Bob

[Douglas Frick]

>Any thoughts on NG Topo vs MapTech

It’s PC-only, so unless you use Virtual PC it’s not going to work on a Mac. It seems comparable in many ways: it’s the same price; the map quality is as good; it’s fast enough except 3D appears to need hardware acceleration for acceptable performance (Topo! probably will as well); it does routes, waypoints and tracks (the routes are probably better than NG Topo!’s automatic route generation); and you can draw tracks and annotate the maps. I like Topo!’s trail drawing features better, Topo! has hyperlinks, and the Topo! profiler’s path is interactive. Topo! has a 1:500K map level, while MapTech doesn’t. Topo! BRE (and maybe Topo! state once it’s updated) has a road database, while MapTech doesn’t.

I can’t see any reason to switch to MapTech, even if it was available for the Mac. But on the PC it appears to be a competitor.

[Author]

Posts