Software Requirements:

The author tried different products available on the market and came to the conclusion that the most convenient, fast and easy to use program is Topo! State Series made by National Geographic, in our case Topo! Mid Atlantic and also Topo! Pennsylvania, Topo! North Carolina.  In order to be able to use this web site one must purchase at least the first one.  Topo! Mid Atlantic has scans of all 7.5 min maps for VA, MD, WV, DE, DC.  It can download traces and waypoints from the majority of the GPS units and upload waypoints to them.  It has a lot of useful features and a very good tutorial, explaining all of them.  After purchasing the software make sure to read and understand the tutorial and install all the updates available on the website.  The web site is www.topo.com. From there go to State Series CD-ROMS.  Don't forget to check the Map eXchange site.  Users post their maps there.  I would recommend to take it with a grain of salt, because the data is submitted by users and can be outdated and even incorrect.  The author relied on the Tridelphia Reservoir trace and it turned out that the trails around the lake were closed 2 years ago.  Topo!  software used to have separate files for traces and waypoints - *.tpo and *.tpg respectively.  Under the free upgrade 3.3 they were all combined under *.tpo.  Topo! Streets and 3-D views is a good package which installs on top of Topo and overlays current (2003) roads on top of the maps.  The 3-D feature is mediocre.

Topo! software has some of limitations.  The major ones are inability to transfer a trace back to the GPS (it’s only possible to transfer the waypoints and the GPS route) and to save the traces in the common formats.  These features are available in a freeware called “GPS TrackMaker (*.gtm files)” available at the http://www.gpstm.com/.  Unfortunately, this program does not have the maps of the region associated with it, so it is recommended to use it only for storing traces.  The files for this program are not edited - they are exactly what came from the GPS Receiver.  Waypoints are not renamed either.  Use these files if you want to upload the trace back to the GPS.  Also use this program when you have a paper map that you can scan.  You can insert the scan into this program and overlay the trace on top of it.  This is what we did for the trip to Ireland.

The topographic software made by Garmin and Magellan is not very useful because its scale only goes to 100,000, while the famous USGS 7,5 min maps have the scale of 24,000.   Actually now they have 24,000 series maps, but only for the national parks - which doesn't cover, Massanutten, Great North Mtn, major parts of the AT, etc.  And they have only a fraction of the features that Topo! has to offer. Save your money there. 

Dimitri Tundra.

Last Update: 02/10/05