nechtiac

Ty mu nechceš preložiť? :D

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andyw

Very helpful I'm sure......now would you like to translate the Czech text in my first post?!

belajloj

Hope the translation doesn't suck so much

Journey to exotic and unknown coutries can be hardly imagined without the GPS nowadays. Although I think that I would be able to work with a sextant and I'm not afraid of using a map combined with a compas neither, user's proficiency and tenuity of the GPS is triumphal. But then, what's the GPS without a map? The fact the GPS knows its precise position and is able to express it using degrees and minutes, would be useless without a proper map. And if a proper map is needed it has to be right on the GPS display.

I've been using Garmin GPS for almost ten years. At first it was the most simpliest version without maps. About six years ago, I bought GPS V, which was the first one including a maps. I have to say that I haven't been using the GPS for a short Europe travels but for a journeys to the third world countries. GPS V had had its own world map, but the map wasn't recommended to me in the shop so that I get the WorldMap. What was my disappointment when I tried to use this map on my travels. Cities had different names, roads were miles away from their real position, overall coverage was very bad. Even the latest version 4, which was borrowed to me, wasn't the right one. There were some improvements like hypsography and coordinates which were cool, though.

After that a friend of mine Vlada told me to visit the SmellyBiker.com.

The whole Bob Marley's project WanderLust Map is using American and Russian maps, which were released for a public use. You can find these maps in another projects such as Welcome to MapCenter. However, the maps are splitted to many smaller areas, therefore their loading into the GPS isn't quite easy and for me it happened to be unsuccesfull with some of them.

Bob has associated with Stanislaw Kozicki, who is author of cGpsMapper. This software creates maps for Garmin using vectorial data. Together, they have made a map for Garmin MapSource, which is easy to install to GPS Garmin.

After installation, map is divided in MapSource to western and eastern part.
Most of the areas has a very good coverage. Since the map still being developed, some areas are covered better than others. Everywhere I've been lately (Libya, Tunisia, Albania, Mongolia, Russia) there was a great residence coverage - all the cities and majority of larger villages. Surprisingly, despite being transcripted to white letter, the names aren't emasculate too much.

Road coverage is very variable according to an area. For example in Poland and Czech Republic it's been rather worse, in Russia perfect and in Mongolia unsteady. Albania has had only main roads. On the borders between Russia and Mongolia you could have perfectly seen how Russia was already completed and even the smallest streams, villages and roads have been visible on the map. Mongolia has worse maps, there have been lots of roads missing, although the question is whether the roads (a rut in a desert) are on any other map at all. The same applies to houses.

The map obviously cannot be collated with a top commercial products such as TopoCZ or Romania. These products are very expensive and their quality is very high.
Then again, it's possible to compare the product to a free map projects of CZ, Marocco and Tunisia. But in this case, Wanderlust is sort of stagnant. However, there's need to be aware of the fact the WanderLust covers the whole world and its developer can't focus only on one country.
The WanderLust is not being sold once-and-for-all, after registration and a payment of 25GBP you are getting lifetime access for a download. The web is hard to orientate, registration can be found on Smellybiker's Wanderlust Worldmap. It's also possible to download a demoversions of maps. Full version of the map has 382Mb.

Not to only praise, the map has one bug. When you install a large area (like it was Europe, Russia and Mongolia in my case) there is a problem with searching in residence list and GPS would turn off after a while.
Obviously, the map isn't perfect, but currently it is the best you can get.

andyw

belajloj - many thanks for that, I appreciate your time and effort doing that for me, very useful.


Andy
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