Wednesday, Nov 19, 2014 at 07:41
That's roughly the point I had made in reply #5.
I made this point in reply to statements like 'Both apps (Hema 4WD Maps and Hema Explorer) are suitable for "offroad" use' and 'The new Hema Navigator HN7 is the complete navigation unit for tourers and four-wheel drivers' (Exploroz
shop).
Hema maps and systems are being hyped.
Quality here as elsewhere is fitness for purpose. Where there's a lot happening on the ground Hema's scale can't represent it so folk should be clear on their nav needs.
My rule of thumb for nav in the mountains is that a map of smaller scale than 50K is unlikely to be a useful guide. In the outback smaller scales can work.
To the original poster, there are a number of suppliers of digital maps apart from Hema. A number of Australian states produce topos at 25K or 30K that are detailed and recent; some can be bought direct as geo-referenced PDFs. Oztopo V6 for Garmins runs at a similar scale and covers the country. There's Magellan and Mud Maps. Also
check out the app Avenza PDF Maps that has some free or cheap topos and town maps.
You also need to decide whether you want moving map, auto-routing and offline storage.
It may be that all you need is good paper maps with a handheld GPSr to locate yourself on one.
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