GPS reviews, news, tips and tricks
TopoFusion Pro 3.60 has been released, adding color aerial imagery for most of the U.S. Previously, color imagery has been restricted to the beautiful high resolution (0.25 meters/pixel) imagery available for urban areas. This new imagery is lower resolution (1 meter/pixel), but it has most of the country’s national forests, national parks, BLM lands, etc. The only weird thing is, Pennsylvania and Texas are red! I’ve included a coverage map and a YouTube demo of TopoFusion, after the jump.
TopoFusion is my go-to program for planning and tracking backcountry adventures. It’s typically the program I turn to first and there is rarely a day that goes by without me using it. Here are ten reasons that TopoFusion rocks:
1. The ability to toggle between USGS topo maps, aerial photos and hybrid imagery
All you have to do is tap “a” on the keyboard to toggle between these views. The TerraServer aerial imagery includes B/W U.S. coverage to 1 meter/pixel and color urban coverage to 0.25 meters/pixel. TopoFusion also accesses Canadian topos, TIGER street maps and worldwide LandSat imagery. The color urban imagery below is of salt ponds at the south end of the San Francisco Bay (16 meters/pixel).
National Geographic TOPO!, a long-standing favorite mapping application, has announced that they will soon be debuting a new Internet-based application. New features will include aerial photos and hybrid imagery that blends aerial photos with contour lines (screen shot above).
TomTom announced today that it is teaming up with Google Maps so users can
search for and send business addresses directly from the Google Maps’ website to TomTom devices.
According to a press release, Google Maps local search pages have expanded their ‘Send to’ feature with the option ‘Send to GPS’. Here’s a video demo…
Travel By GPS and Geovative Solutions have partnered for some tracking fun on Christmas Eve.
This year you can add a personal placemark so that your residence will show on Santa’s itinerary. Better hurry though, the cut-off for placemark submission is December 23rd!
Years ago, long before I got my first GPS, I came across a map of U.S. counties, and I started using it to record my travels. Over the years, that map became tattered and torn — "loved to death" as it were. Paper versions are still available, but it really needed to be replaced by the digital variety. So I was thrilled when Free Geography Tools recently wrote about Color Your Map, which allows you to color countries of the world, U.S. states, or counties within a state, and view them in Google Earth. So I assembled 50 files; you can see the results of 48 of them below.
EarthNC.com, best known as a source for nautical data, has announced a new service and website — TakItWithMe.com, which allows you to transfer Google Maps data and KML files directly to Garmin receivers, or download them as GPX files. The site utilizes the new Garmin Communicator plugin.
I just gave it a try and it worked very well. Output can be downloaded as waypoints, tracks and routes. The team there has put together a great video (shown below, after the jump) that does an excellent job of showing you how. It’s really pretty simple.
Google may want to take over the world, but they’ve got a ways to go before they’re ready to produce a navigation device. Check out a Google Maps route from Boston to London. Step 9 says "swim across the Atlantic Ocean."
If people will follow their GPS receiver’s directions into a river, are they dumb enough to drive their car into the ocean? No, it says swim, so they would park first and then jump in, right?
Via Google Earth Blog.
Though I live by the sea, I’m a mountain lover at heart. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than peak-bagging, and once I’m there, there’s nothing as fun as looking off to the horizon, and figuring out what peaks I’m seeing. Well that just got easier, thanks to a new Google Maps mashup titled Hey, what’s that?
Plugging in your favorite peak is easy. Simply go to the New Panorama tab and navigate via the map interface to the peak of your choice. A planned future addition is to have peak names show up on the map interface to help you navigate once you get close. For now, you can use the map, satellite imagery and the Contours button. Once you get close, there is a button that allows you to fine tune your location, automatically choosing the nearest high point. After that, all you really have to do is name your map, which you can make public. That’s what I did with Cahto Peak, California.
Google announced today that they are adding live traffic to Google Maps. Now you can’t use this on your PND, but it is available on some GPS cell phones via Google Mobile.
This has me wondering about Google’s economic model (give stuff away, make a killing on ads) and the coming cell phone GPS vs. PND wars. Using your cell phone as a GPS is nothing like the experience of a dedicated, decent sized touch-screen device and, while cell phones may take some market share (those folks with only rare or occasional navigation needs), I’ve thought that there is still plenty of room for growth in the PND market.
But Garmin and others better take a close look at this. I wonder how long it will be before a GPS manufacturer comes out with a dual model — pay for traffic services, or get them for free in exchange for seeing location based ads.
Free traffic and satellite photos is a pretty good deal. And while I haven’t found out what traffic service provider Google is using, their coverage appears to be good too. I routinely drive through Santa Rosa, CA, and live traffic reports have yet to show up on my nuvi 660, but here it is on Google Maps.
GPS Tracklog is written by Rich Owings, author of GPS Mapping.
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