Sunday, Feb 21, 2016 at 11:23
Just a general comment about making GPS decisions - from hard-won experience ...
You need to start with the question 'which maps'? Not which GPS. That's just the hardware (though it often comes bundled with maps).
You can only answer 'which maps' by being clear about your needs. Getting around urban areas may be one, and that's pretty easy to satisfy. Navigating tracks though is quite different and the maps will be different. In my experience on foot or on skis, where you can't afford a significant mistake, the scale of maps needed is 1:50 K or larger, and they must be topographic. (A small scale map is designated by a larger number. So eg. the Hema
Vic High Country paper map is 1:200 K. That packs a lot of ground into one sheet. But if you've got to do fine navigation bear in mind that one millimetre on the map equals 200 hundred metres on the ground - that will often make choice of turn where several tracks meet up difficult to visualise.)
Then there's other features that vary by map maker, typically man-made ones like huts or gates but also perhaps
services, campgrounds and so on. In the
Vic high country knowing where there are gates is important as in winter they're often closed so the tracks don't get torn up by hoons. For some folk it's not worth paying for these extra features since they won't figure in their planning.
Once you're clearer on what you need, it's a good idea to seek out sample maps of an area you know
well to decide if it has the information needed for planning. Ask the supplier to send you a screen dump. Cos as with paper maps, some are informative and
well drafted and others are not.
There are of course other considerations: cost, accuracy and extent of coverage.
GPSs also run software to interface between the hardware and the digital map. It handles waypoints, routes, tracks, user-defined points of interest, downloaded POIs like campsites and speed cameras and so on. In the era of tablets this software is (finally) becoming intuitive (ie. simple), not requiring hours with a manual and practice. For a GPS beginner, a tablet with 3rd party maps (if they meet your needs) can be a quick way into full use of digital mapping.
I recommended above that you look at Hema maps for the extra info. They're
well drafted maps. I also find a good few errors in them and they're too small in scale to work for me. I don't like the way they handle zooming - at least in Explorer, where essentially there are two mapsets for different scales. Their new mapsets (? 140K) may be better.
I've gone a different route (cough) after using a Hema Navigator and Explorer on a tablet, with Oztopo maps that I can swap between the three Garmins that I use (car, motorbike, feet). These are topographic vector maps that handle zooming
well. They cover the country at the equivalent of 25K but they do lack a lot of man-made features.
Hope this helps.
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