Topo Canada v2 vs. Ibycus Topo Canada

At the request of that Ken at the other end of the country here are a couple of pics to start the thread. Check the file names for which product is which.

There are many differences in favor of each product so there's no straight answer to which is better. Since Ibycus topos are free and I already owned Topo Canada I took the easy way out and have both so I don't need to choose.

Ken, I just picked Cheticamp Lake up near the Cape Breton Highlands Park at random. If there is someplace that would be more meaningful to you please let me know. It's dead simple to do a screen capture. Also let me know if you need a tighter zoom level or bigger area.

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Okay, here's a bit of background on the Ibycus topos. They are created by Dale Atkin in Calgary. He's a full-time student. He's using the latest government databases for most of his data so the actual topographic data and some of the road data (depending on province) is much more up to date than Topo Canada. If you have ever used 1:50,000 federal or provincial topographic maps you'll be immediately familiar with what you see in these maps.

They are loaded with detail and they take many hours to download on a highspeed connection. You download the tiny updater from Dale's site. The first time you run it, it will download all the maps and install them into MapSource. Any time you run it after that it will just download any new or changed maps. Your best bet is to start it up just before you head for bed.

Ooops, for the Americans in the crowd, it's worth noting that Dale has also got a pretty good start on a set of topos for the United States. I'll poke around and see if I can find a link to them. If anyone knows or finds it before I do, please post a link in this thread.

...ken...

Wow, you aren't kidding about how long the download takes. I started it at 11:00 PM when I went to bed and I'm only at 1674 of 2724 files at 7:00 AM the next morining. They're still coming in though...

Update: I explained to my wife what I was doing with this download but it slipped her mind as she was going to work and she shut the computer off.

So, I popped by the house at lunch to see how the download was going and discovered this. I started the download up again and it searched throughout my hard drive and then started from scratch. Oh well...

It finished downloading sometime through Friday night so I tried it Saturday morning and it wouldn't work.. MapSource wouldn't run as "NTDBData" was corrupted. I tried a few things but none of them fixed the problem and as I wasn't sure where the problem was, even after reading all the posts by Ken and Terry in the Mapsource to Mobile PC error thread. I just took the computer back to a Windows restore point from last Wednesday. MapSource was fine then.

I then took MapSource back to ver. 6.13.7 by running the 6.13.7 update (found here: How to install MapSource to add maps to Mobile PC , thanks Ken) twice overtop of the existing MapSource version 6.14.1 installation as was recommended by Terry. This worked flawlessly, MapSource continued to work just fine. I needed to do this anyway to get MapSource to work with Mobile PC.

I'll try the Ibycus Topo download again on Monday night, after the turkey has been eaten and the guests have gone home.

Happy Thankgiving! to all the Canadians on the forum. A Happy Thanksgiving! to the Amercians too, but a little early for you folks.

Okay, here's the location for the Ibycus USA topos for anyone who is interested.

<edit>Expired link removed</edit>

If you're interested in all the details of the USA topos you can read this thread and see the development as it happens. It will also explain all about downloading and using them.

http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/ind...ic=189762&st=0

...ken...

Picked up the thread on Google, and thought I'd poke my head in. Recently released version 2.1. Any of you still on 1.22, I strongly encourage you to download (Ken in Cape Bretton, it looks from the error you were getting that you might be running 1.22).

I'm trying to set up a torrent tracker for this version, along with the usual download URLs (MapUpdate is now finito, as I having too many problems with it, and all the tiles were changing with each release anyways, so...)

http://www.ibycus.com/ibycustopo is the Canadian Topos
http://www.ibycus.com/ibycususa are the US street maps (no topo yet, but I do have road names everywhere, and rivers, lakes, streams etc...topo will come when I get a chance, school is pretty hectic).

The torrent tracker is at:
http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/449...37.TPB.torrent

Let me know if you can download anything, as I'm not totally sure I set it up right.

Dale

Hi Dale,

Thanks for dropping by and thanks for filling us in on the current content of the USA maps. I was mistaken about the topo content. Even so, you've done a prodigious job for someone carrying a full course load.

The 2.1 version of the Canadian topos is excellent. I just downloaded the ISO file a few days ago. It surpasses the Garmin Topo Canada v2 by a big stretch.

...ken...

Clearly I am uneducated about these things.
I downloaded the 3 GIG file from Ibycus, installed the Garmin Mapsource disk. When I tried to open the Ibycus file in Mapsource, it says IbycusTopo21iso.zip is not a valid Mapsource file. So I'm stumped.

Hi,

You'll need to install the maps (rather than just download them).

From the name of the file, you downloaded the ISO version. Easiest way to use this is to burn to a DVD (there are others if you don't have a DVD burner).

1. Unzip file
2. Burn ISO to a DVD as an image (most burning software has this ability built in, exact method varies by software, but is generally pretty straight forward
3. Run Setup.exe on the DVD
4. Open mapsource
5. Select "Ibycus Topo" from the drop down list in the top left hand corner
6. hit 'm'
7. select the mapsheets you want to send to the GPS
8. Hit transfer to device.

Dale

Hi Stan,

Here are some computer basics that have nothing to do with GPS technology or Mapsource:

1. You can't do squat with a .zip file. It's just a way to compress stuff into a smaller package to make it easier to download. So you have to unzip it to get the good stuff out and usable.

2. This particular zip file contains a .iso file. A .iso file is just a CD or DVD image. There's only one thing you can do with a .iso file and that's use it to burn a CD or DVD. So you need to unzip this .iso file to your desktop or somewhere you can find it easily and then run whatever software you use to burn DVDs and create a DVD from the IbycusTopo21.iso file (don't forget where you unzipped it to ).

3. Once you've successfully burned the DVD you've finally got something useful to work with. You pop the DVD into your DVD drive and it should autorun the installer for the Ibycus topo maps. This will install the Ibycus topos into Mapsource for you.

4. Now you're good to go with the Ibycus topos in Mapsource. In case you aren't familiar with Mapsource, you don't use the FILE>OPEN commands to look at maps that have been installed into Mapsource. There will be a dropdown box just under the FILE menu line that will contain a list of the maps you have installed in Mapsource. You just select "Ibycus Topo 2.1" from the dropdown selector.

Enjoy.

EDIT: Ooops, I see Dale beat me to the punch. We must have been typing at the same time only he's not as longwinded. )

...ken...

Not quite 100% true (although mostly true and probably the easiest thing you can do with it).

There are programs out there that will allow you to extract the contents of an ISO file the same way you can a zip file. (Pretty sure 7-Zip will do this). There are also programs out there (daemon-tools is an example) that will allow you to create essetially a 'fake' CD/DVD drive on your computer and 'mount' the iso file to it (so your computer thinks it has an extra drive that has the Ibycus Topo DVD in it). You can then run setup from there.

I mention the above for two reasons:

1. Its really cool, and warrants sharing.
2. On the off chance that Stan doesn't have a DVD burner, it will save him downloading another 3+GB file!

Dale

Thanks for the additional information, Dale. I wasn't aware of either point. I use 7-zip (Love it!). I just checked and you're right, it will treat a .iso file just like a .zip archive and let you extract the files.

If Stan doesn't have a DVD burner, using 7-zip to extract the files from the .iso file to a temporary folder should allow him to run the SETUP.EXE program and install without having to get the other utility to fake a DVD drive, wouldn't it?

EDIT: Here's a link for DAEMON Tools Lite for anyone interested in playing with an optical drive emulator.

...ken...

Yep, it should.

Dale, the author of Ibycus Topo Canada has posted a set of three YouTube videos explaining the download and installation process for his map set. He now has a torrent up and running and also demonstrates a map set utility called MapSet Tool Kit along with other useful things. These can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibycus314

These are great topos of Canada. Better than Garmin's own in ways, more up to date, with vegetation cover, better detail of wet lands, etc. You can't auto navigate with them though but that usually isn't what you use topos for. I highly recommend them.

So i spent hours downloading the Ibycus, and it won't even unzip. Is there something peculiar to this, and am I just in for another 6 hr download?

Thanks