Paul Saunders said:Quoted message said:Most important thing in this NG is 'are the footpaths
shown' ? Does your 'someone' know ?
As I recall, he said it doesn't even show buildings, so it
wouldn't surprise me if there are no footpaths either. I'd
be happy to just to get a few contours, streams and
indications of cliffs.
No, there are no buildings (unless you count POIs, but
they're rather limited .. campsites etc.). Nothing useful
like a Church spire. The reason given for this is that the
screen is too small to handle the clutter (but if they were
done as POIs they could be disabled as neeeded ..).
There ARE footpaths (unlike the German Garmin maps another
poster has seen). However, they're patchy : in some places
excellent and very accurate, in some places there are big
gaps, with short sections of footpath isolated in the middle
of nowhere. There are two grades of non-roads : paths (a
single dotted line that looks inconveniently like a
tracklog) and tracks (double dotted line implying a route
passable by tractors). Neither, however, is necessarily a
right of way (and the manual makes a point of stating that
ROW are not indicated). Paths appear never to be named (even
if they're national routes).
Small streets are are sometimes not shown, even though they
appeared in the older, cheaper, larger coverage 'streets
Europe' software. This can be very annoying when a short
country lane links to a footpath, as the lane is not shown
at any zoom level and the footpath or tracks appears to end
short of a main road.
There are plenty of contours. However, I understand that
they're plotted on the fly from a database with a fixed
horizontal resolution. This has some conveniences, but it's
not good at showing areas of high slope. I'm not sure what
the horizontal resolution is, but the US topo maps are said
to be 90m so it could be pretty poor. The contours shown
can be much more closely spaced than this (4m at best)
which could imply they're largely fictitious. This needs
testing, but the region I'm in (East Anglia) doesn't lend
itself to the job.
There are no feature marks for cliffs, so with the limited
contour resolution I most certainly wouldn't use it alone to
find a route down in fog ..
Some summits are labelled, but not at all accurately. The
label often appears on a nearby slope rather than adjacent
to a spot height indicator.
Water is shown very well - at least as well, if not better
than footpaths. An irritation is that detailed water appears
at the least-zoomed level of detail maps, whereas some roads
(including most unclassified country roads) appear at a more
detailed level. This means that at some zoom levels, you can
see drainage ditches but not roads!
I would say that it's marginally useful at present, but with
some small changes (more sensible water detail levels, road
detail taken from 'streets Europe' maps, addition of some
useful POIs, correction of summit labels, naming of some
recognised national paths) it could be quite decent.
It could really do with facilities for OS grid references
too, but I would imagine that's a rather drastic change
for the PC software : not much chance of it. It's a pity
the GPS manufacturers are such a closed shop - if someone
like Anquet did the PC software and left the GPS
manufacturer to concentrate on the embedded software we'd
get much better products.
However, there's been a further development : the UK
distributor is apparently very unhappy with the quality and
has persuaded Magellan to withdraw the product. I would hope
that they're aiming to re-release it, but I have no idea
when or with what changes. I'm impressed that they feel it
should be withdrawn (money back offered) rather than just
left hanging for another release, though. It's a bit of a
novelty in the software world !
-adrian
