Other sources for maps for Garmin 60CS? Other GPS...

It's not only an issue for routing. If you just have a scanned map it
will only look ok over a narrow range of zoom scales - zoom out too far
and there's too much clutter; zoom in too far and you lose detail. So
you'd need a whole series of scanned maps at different scales and have
the software switch between them properly as you zoom in and out. Even
that isn't really satisfactory since it's hard to include enough road
names and other labels to be useful without creating too much clutter.
With vector maps the name appears when you move the cursor over the
road. And the map is only useful if you can find things on it which is
frequently hard to do on the small screen size of handheld devices. So
having search capability to look for addresses, street names,
intersections, business locations, etc. is very useful. This would be
hard to implement with scanned raster maps.

Hans-Georg Michna <

True, if you want routing. But if you don't have a routing GPS in the first
place (most don't) then that's not an issue. If you just want to see where
you are on the map, most displays should work.

--
Regards,

Stan

The site for the German map provider indicates:
"Mit der TOPO Karte Deutschland steht eine digitale topographische
Vektorkarte von Deutschland zur Verf??gung, die in kartenf??hige
GPS-Ger??te von Garmin geladen werden kann."
I.e. vector topo maps of Germany that can be loaded into mapping
Garmin GPS units.

And the cover of the box shows a hand holding an eTrex Vista
with the TOPO maps displayed on its screen. Not sure how
they could make it any clearer.

I remember how many messages it took to finally convince you
that Magellan now offers auto-routing on their units. So if
you still have doubts about these map offers I suggest you
contact the various providers directly.

On 10 Sep 2004 01:14:05 GMT, Stan Gosnell

Stan,

raster formats like JPEG don't cut it, because you need vector
information, like where the roads and their lanes are, where you
can turn off, addresses, etc.

In other words, you can't just scan a paper map, load it into a
GPS receiver, and expect it to route you automatically to your
destination address.

Hans-Georg

--
No mail, please.

Peter,

I just checked the German third party map offer, but I couldn't
find any hint that these maps can actually be loaded into a
Garmin GPS. What they offered were only route planning and
transferring the routes to the GPS, not the maps.

It looks as if some others of those third party maps can
actually be loaded into Garmin GPS devices, but I haven't
thoroughly checked more of those maps.

Hans-Georg

--
No mail, please.