GPS–Making Maps

As I’ve said, I first got into GPS technology because I wanted to measure our courses and make maps of trail routes. If you want to use your wrist GPS as a training tool, that’s great. Likewise the cycling GPSes (like my poor Garmin Edge 305 that got run over). However, every time you go traveling, that GPS starts keeping a “track log” of location points. With the GPSes I’m familiar with, those track logs can be transfered to a computer. Once on the computer, you can analyze the data yourself, or you can import the data into mapping programs that display and analyze the data for you. I’ve mostly done the later, but I’m experimenting with spreadsheets recently.

The point of the maps I make is keep people on the correct route in our trail systems. They need to know approximately how far they’ll be running, where and how much they’ll be climbing, and which way to turn at junctions. Some of the maps I’ve made don’t even use GPS tracks. I’ve traced the route with the mapping program’s drawing tools, and let the program estimate the distance and climb from the map trace.

That said, I’ve been collecting GPS tracks for years and using them wherever possible. Typically, it’s the mapping software itself that transfers the log files from the GPS to your computer. The older GPSes had serial ports, the newer ones have USB ports. Here’s a list of the mapping programs I’ve tried with any comments I have.

Delorme Topo USA (www.delorme.com) Windows. This was the first mapping software I tried, years ago. I didn’t like the way they handled maps, maybe because I was used to working with the US Geological Survey topographic maps. Delorme added their own information in ways I didn’t care for. I haven’t tried the product recently. This is a perfectly good product, just not my style.

MapTech Terrain Navigator Pro (www.maptech.com) Windows. This is the product I’ve used most extensively. I liked the sharpness and detail of their digitized USGS maps. The base maps are the pure topo maps, no added information. However, over the years MapTech has added additional underlying information, like Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and address databases. This means the programs shows the elevation and the address at the cursor location. Most of the maps we use for the series are made with Terrain Navigator or Terrain Navigator Pro. The negatives with TN are the proprietary formats it uses to store the maps and the GPS data, although it allows export of the data. It only uses the DEM data to compute elevation profile, not the elevation data in the GPS track logs. You can’t edit individual track data points (More on that later). Nevertheless, this tool is an old friend for making usable, readable maps with notes on the map. I’m using version 7, not version 8–8 didn’t have any features I really wanted.  I’ve worked with their tech support, including actual developers over the years and they’ve been good folks.

TopoFusion (TF) (www.topofusion.com) Windows. This is a very interesting program written by the Morris brothers, Scott and Alan. I’ve corresponded extensively with Scott, who’s a talented ultra-endurance mountain biker working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science. They wrote the tool to help them track their adventures. TF provides extensive GPS track manipulation capability. This is very useful when the GPS doesn’t get a good signal and provides wildly inaccurate track points, like in the chute near Baldy Saddle on Mt. Wrightson. The negative to TF when I first worked with it was that it depended on the TerraServer topo maps, which weren’t great quality. I’ve been known to edit tracks in TF, then move the data back to Terrain Navigator to improve the look of my final map. Recently, the Morrises have broadened the choices for source maps.

MacGPS Pro (www.macgpspro.com) Mac. When I converted my home computing setup to Apple’s computers, I wanted an OS X (the Mac’s operating system) native GPS mapping tool. This is another very interesting program written by Larry James. I’ve corresponded with Larry and it was very helpful in my understanding of how DEM data is used compute elevation profiles. MacGPS Pro has the best capability to import maps from various sources of any product I’ve seen. That said, they sell maps sets by state that are easily added to the program’s data store. It doesn’t have as good a GPS track data manipulation as TopoFusion, but you can select individual track points and delete them, which I use to clean up the drifting data points my GPS produces when I stop (I collect data every second…). It lacks some features I would like, but if you’re a Mac user and want a native Mac product, you should look at this program.

Topo! (www.natgeomaps.com/topo.html) Windows and Mac. This is a popular product that I hadn’t used yet, so I purchased a copy in January 2008. I’ve initially found the Mac version to be very unstable and unusable. I discussed it with the nice folks at National Geographic tech support, but we didn’t resolve the matter. So I installed the Windows version (Yes you can run Windows software on Macs…) and have worked with it a bit. Nice maps. Imports track data nicely. It seems to estimate slightly shorter distances than my other programs, so I’m puzzled by that. Very nice looking maps. The Windows user interface looks better to me than the Mac interface. More recently, I think I’ve tied the Mac issues into my use of a “virtual machine” tool called VMware fusion that most Mac users don’t have on their computers.  Topo! is more stable now, but it still crashes when I load the really large GPS tracks I’ve been making lately.  I like the maps and will be experimenting with them for our trail run series.  I’m still in conversation with the Nat Geo folks and am testing a new product of theirs.

MapSource (www.garmin.com) Windows. Garmin has mapping software that comes with some of their GPSes. The sport-specific products come with sport-specific software that may allow mapping, too. I haven’t purchased any of their maps, which are separate from the base product. The base product is handy for getting the data into a computer and examining the track log. It estimates distances and show elevation graphs. You can look at the actual track log data listed as tables with each row a data point. You can delete bad data. You can do worse than work with Garmin’s tools if you own a Garmin.  I’ve only called Garmin tech support once several years ago (They were OK.).

I’ll expand this page, but this will get you started if you want to find usable mapping software.