Free Topographic Maps

[Schaffer Addicted PP Member Find all posts View Profile Close Schaffer]

Re: Free Topographic Maps

While the wife was out shopping late last night I was mucking around a little bit and found some article about making your own topo maps for a Garmin unit using MapConnect. I thought I'd have a look and see if you can customise the GA 250k maps out as ECW. It appears that you can't BUT what I did find is that the resolution of the maps GA seem to have been improved since the last time I downloaded these. I've got a copy of McBains downloads which where the same resolution as what was on GA about two or three months ago but now the maps are better quality.

I would show a couple of pictures to demonstrate but I'm at work and things are locked down that much that I can't upload into my internet FTP account to show. No chance with Photobucket from here either.

I downloaded the whole of SA last night and about half of Vic. I'll see how I go with the others and upload after converting to Ozi native format

[LiveFreeAndRoam Avid PP Poster! Find all posts View Profile Close LiveFreeAndRoam]

Re: Free Topographic Maps

Hi Schaffer,

About the easiest way I have found to download topo maps for my Garmin is with the ShonkyMaps, which are also free.

All the same, I will be interested to learn how the higher res GA maps that you found, compare to the current set. I would guess Shonky will upgrade to them in the near term...

LFaR.

[Schaffer Addicted PP Member Find all posts View Profile Close Schaffer]

Re: Free Topographic Maps

Hi Schaffer,

About the easiest way I have found to download topo maps for my Garmin is with the ShonkyMaps, which are also free.

All the same, I will be interested to learn how the higher res GA maps that you found, compare to the current set. I would guess Shonky will upgrade to them in the near term...

LFaR.

Not sure if Shonky will update. I recall something on his site saying that this had been a labour of love but nothing else was going to happen. No additional tracks and no support. I would guess he's done his bit

Now here are some screenshots pulled into PhotoBucket. I hope this is not mucked up.
Tried to screen capture the same are of Adelaide and hills:
Old GA Map

New GA Map


Seems to have worked. The newer image is also reduced in size as PhotoBucket is setup for me to auto reduce to 800x600 format so the second image was larger at the same zoom scale.

The actual images sizes are:
Old 641x588
New 1014x942

The screen grab is not identical but I think it does demonstrate that the new ECW which are raster images are a better quality than the old.

I've now downloaded SA, Vic and Tas. Have also converted these to Ozi format without adjusting colour or size. The funny thing is the actual ozi files are much larger than the ECW format. Without that much knowledge of the two formats I'd guess that ECW allows for 16.6 million colours like JPG and PNG while ECW only allows possibly 256 like a GIF.

[Schaffer Addicted PP Member Find all posts View Profile Close Schaffer]

Re: Free Topographic Maps

Found a resource of 1:250k Geological maps for Northern Territory. Not usful for navigating by but might be of interesting for all those budding Geos out there:
1:250K Raster Geology Map Index
I can probably get this direct from the GA site but anyhow

I know my wife will find this interesting