PDOP'S GPS PAGES!

I became interested in the Global Positioning System (GPS) through work and purchased my first GPS hand held receiver, a Garmin GPS12, for my own use in mid 2000. This lead to the purchase of paper topographic maps for my local area to use in concert with my new GPSr (the "r" denotes receiver as opposed to the entire system)

I then discovered that there were freeware programs available that could download the data collected in my GPSr and overlay this data on maps. Obtaining maps was the problem. At first I tried scanning my paper maps but was limited by the small size of my scanner. To get one 1:50,000 scale topomap into a usable form required multiple scans which then had to be stitched together with a separate program. Once the map was back in one piece digitally it then had to be calibrated for use in the mapping program. Way too much work.

Luckily about this time free digital mapping became available on-line. The Toporama digital maps are low resolution duplicates of the paper maps produced by the Centre for Topographic Information in Sherbrooke (CTIS) and cover most of Canada. They lack some of the detail of the paper maps but the price is right. Our tax dollars at work, eh ;-)

The Toporama maps and the freeware program GPS Trackmaker (from Brazil) became my favorite combination which I used for a couple of years. I would still recommend this combination for people new to this topic (see my tutorial here.) The maps have to be manually calibrated but what do you want for free.

Eventually my desire for higher quality maps and their increasing availability in the market place lead me to buy the commercial products. They are still just scans of the paper maps but they arrive nicely stitched together and precalibrated for use with the software. And there are hundreds of them on a CD!!

I did end up buying a commercial software packages to take advantage of the precalibrations so now using the maps is just the matter of a mouse click.

My first purchase of digital maps was the Navitrak Interactive Topographical Mapping CD for Banff National Park. These were sold by Canadian Geographic but have since been discontinued. The CD had seamless fully detailed topo maps in the 1:50000 and 1:250000 scales, map viewer and a GPS interface all for $15 (marked down from $50). The maps could only be displayed and printed by the Navitrak software. The GPS program allowed download of waypoints, routes and tracks but only uploading of waypoints in routes. A real time navigation feature was also included. The program also displayed elevation profiles of routes which is handy for hiking in the mountains.

To get coverage of my local area I next bought SoftMap seamless digital maps which covered all of southwest Alberta. This product didn't come with a GPS interface so I purchased a fully featured GPS mapping program called FUGAWI (named after that lost tribe of pygmies) to use it with.

This link will take you to a price comparison of the digital maps available.

Please understand that none of the above products will load into your GPSr. Lowrance, Garmin and Magellan are producing topographic maps for Canada which can be used in their respective GPSr's. As well, free Canadian topographic maps in Garmin's format are avialable from The Ibycus Topo Map Project.