Garmin iQue 3600

Just looked at your second rig pic. I always thoughthe was Russell Coight. Does he send out autographed photos of his pootrol.

How much for the Garmin Paul?

A friend of mine has one and it has whole areas missing from the map. Good around town but out bush it leaves a bit to be desired.

Make sure the map has the bush on it or if it only works as a city navigator.

Sparkie(IE not Y) ;-)

This is the basic difference between raster and vector mapping.

The Magellan DiscoverAus CD (which I have) and the Garmin Mapsource are vector based maps. The computer/PDA reads information from a database to calculate and build the map for display at any scale and the words all stay the same size.

OziExplorer is a raster map program which is basically just a big picture. When you zoom in the features get bigger including the words which are just printed on the map. This is why you can scan maps and aerial photos and calibrate them for use with OziExplorer.

Vector maps take sophisticated software to produce. They mostly show roads and points of interest while raster maps can be quite detailed and show topo lines and other features. To illustrate the different sizes I can fit vector maps of the whole of Australia showing every street in every town and every outback track on a 256Mb SD card and have room to store a few track files. In contrast, I have a raster map for OziExplorer of the Mount Lofty Ranges, Flurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island and it just fit on a 650Mb CD. The difference is that the raster maps has full topo detail while the vector map only shows the roads, outines of water bodies and popints of interest.

To use raster maps on a PDA uses huge amounts of memory which usually means using large expensive memory cards. Also many PDAs only have one slot and if you have to use this for the GPS attachment then you have no storage for the maps.

The new Garmin has an integrated GPS receiver as well as a memory slot.

Then there are the two major breeds of PDA. Windows CE (a PDA cut down version of Windows) and the PALM operating system. Most of the good software seems to be on WinCE but it seems from another reply above that OziExplorer is available for palm. That would be good because I have a Palm Tungsten C.

Hope my outpouring of facts helps some people in thier choice!!!!

Cheers
Muddy

Heya Gerk Yorke Pen

Have you tried the Oziexplorer CE Software? OziExplorer CE is GPS Mapping Software allows you to work with maps on a PDA/CE that you create from scanned or purchased digital raster maps.

Have a read about it

I don't know about you but the issue with raster maps is that it becomes pixellated as you zoom in. This sometimes makes it difficult to work out whether it is a map or a work of art. What you could consider is a HP PDA that allows noth options, Raster and or Vector. BT GPS allows the PDA to be anywhere in your vehicle/boat etc and is going cheap at my place.

Nothing outside of Garmin software works on a Garmin, unless you buy the iQue3600/3200. But then again, who wants a Palm?

Using Natmaps 1:250k scale each pixel covers just over 30m. Unless you are looking for buried treasure this is plenty accruate enough. Using a more detailed scale you can achieve even more accuracy. e.g. my melways map is down to 4m per pixel which is about as accurate as the GPS.

I used to think vectors were better beacuse they were infinately scalable but having used raster mapping I wouldn't change.

Gaz