GPS & digital mapping questions

Hi. As everyone was once, I am just starting the climb of GPS & digital mapping in general I was looking for a handheld GPS till I found this website & actually took a good look at these softwares (which I had seen before, but simply put to the side, at least the interest stayed!).

It seems that Garmin nRoute is not as good & aesthetic as GarminMobilePC; which is on par with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2009. Also reading around here it looks like those add-ons for Streets & Trips that are stickied seem to have either been put into the program now or are not that needed. Although I did see some Google Earth integration in the add-ons.. (haha first question..) doesn't Google Earth use the internet, so reaLly, that wouldn't be useful tracking GPS or is it to simply save your trip data.. or would it not even pick that up without the internet?

I am also on the brink of getting one of these programs hopefully. Is it only Garmin that has support for open source maps? Also, it seems that Garmin is the only one that can get you any coverage in places like India, Russia, Greece, Iran, & Egypt. I was wondering if that was correct or can you do this with Microsoft's products?

And my last question.. for the hour lol.. kmz & kml files. Do they have any use in GPS software, can any address data be taken from them? I mean, after it is converted into whichever format it has to be, I bet there are plenty of filetype converters out there (I just don't know any yet).

Hello again, & someone should tell this guy his teeth will rot off at the rate he is smoking that >> (sry, emoticons were vry distracting lol)

I can't say that Garmin is the only map format that is available from volunteer and commercial third parties. But it is the most widely available by a huge amount. If you want a map for some part of the world it's most likely you will find it in Garmin format if you can find it at all. And if you want a free map that some volunteer(s) have built it's also most likely that you'll find one in Garmin format. There are so many tools that handle Garmin format directly that it makes it much easier if you are going to work in that format.

One of the most common GPS file converters is GPSBabel. It converts nearly everything to anything else. Check their home page at the link for a good description.

Google Earth is great if you have an internet connection because you can see the satellite views of almost every place. If you $ub$cribe to Google Earth Plus or Google Earth Pro you can load parts of the planet into the local map cache so that you can still use it without a connection. GE Plus allows a 2GB map cache and GE Pro is more.

I have a one-year subscription to GE Plus just to see how useful it is for navigation. It was very quickly clear to me that it's not very good. The realtime tracking is pretty awful and to get a decent amount of map detail into the cache you can't get very wide coverage. Also, you need to find a program that will automatically load the cache for you. When I first got it the only way to load the cache was to actually view the areas you planned to be, at the detail level you wanted to have with you. That is an extremely tedious chore. And there was no easy way to tell when the cache was full, so the first couple of times I tried it I discovered the most important parts of the coverage had been pushed out of the cache because I tried to put too much in.

I still use it lots when I'm travelling, but only with an internet connection in the hotel room, to view the tracks of where I've been (loaded from my personal navigation device or another nav program on the laptop) or plan where we're going next.

Hope that's some help.

...ken...

Thank you ken! That is great to know program specific map files can be easily converted. That just leaves me wondering, if I do find a map of.. the UAE.., would Garmin be the only one that would even -accept- it after being converted? Say I convert it to run on MapPoint, does MapPoint even have that area of the world sensable in it's program? GarminMobilePC does have the whole world sensable though?

I'm sorry I didn't describe things better. Program-specific map files canNOT, in most cases, be easily converted. In most cases they can't be converted at all.

Perhaps you should have a close look at the GPSBabel home page. I did not mean to imply that you can convert lots of map files. The files that GPSBabel converts are files containing things like waypoints and routes and tracks. These are just various forms of data points.

A Waypoint is a single data point that has some specific information associated with it; for instance, the geographic location (latitude, longitude), an indentifying name or number and optionally a symbol (icon).

A POI (point of interest) is just a special form of waypoint that has additional information associated with it; for instance, business name, street address, phone number and perhaps some categories (donut shop, gas bar, dress shop, etc.).

A Route is a series of data points that will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

A Track is just the same as a route, except it's a series of data points tracking where you already traveled.

Various planning and navigation programs will only accept these items in specific formats. GPSBabel, and other programs, convert the waypoint, POI, route and/or track data files between the formats required by the different programs.

As far as I know there is no way to add map data to most of the laptop navigation programs out there, like Streets&Trips, iGuidance and others. That is, I am not aware of any way to convert a map of some part of the world into a format that Streets&Trips will use because I don't think anyone except Microsoft knows what that map format is.

Garmin's map format, on the other hand, is very well understood and very widely supported.

There are other programs out there that will allow you to take maps from a variety of sources and use them. Examples are OziExplorer and Pathaway. With either of these programs you can, for instance, scan a map, load it into the program from jpeg, bmp or tiff formats and calibrate the picture of the map to use for navigation.

The resulting maps are still just pictures. They do not have any of the other data that is so useful and necessary for navigation, like street, road, and highway data, address data, city/town names and waypoint and POI information.

I'm not sure if that helps or just makes things more confusing. It's a complicated subject when you want to get into doing anything on your own, instead of just plugging in what the manufacturer provides and using it unmodified.

The important thing to remember that there is far more to a map than just the picture you see on the screen. And even the picture you see on the screen is not, in most cases, really a picture at all. Garmin map files do not contain pictures. They are true databases. The navigation programs use the data stored in those database files to render pictures on the screen for navigation use. This is true of most of the laptop navigation programs. (Incidentally, that's why realtime navigation can be so frustrating on cheap underpowered laptops. It takes quite a bit of processing and graphics power to make those pretty pictures on the screen fast enough to keep up with even modest driving speeds.)

There I go complicating things again.

...ken...

Ken,
Maybe I am biased, but that explanation is so clear and lucid, it should be flagged somewhere.

Terry