Can anybody recommend where my friends and I could find or create some detailed Tasmania topo maps suitable for loading into a handheld garmin gps and hiking with?
Ideally topo but also including hydrography, roads, towns and placenames; and accurate enough that it wouldn't put the user at risk of falling off a cliff or freezing to death in a cul de sac... Like this: http://www.memory-map.co.nz/products/tour/AU-Scrn-Grb_TAS-25k-lge.jpg Except free...? More than simply a data request ... if this is unavailable perhaps it behooves us to try and somehow see if it can't be solved as a general kind of problem. Here's what I know so far: As many of you know there is a community of amateur cartography aficionados in the space of hiking. This group somewhat overlaps with the more geeky hacker types. Whenever one looks at any new space ( such as say hiking, sailing, diving, humanitarian efforts, environment ) there often seems to be the same pattern replicated wholesale; yet more map geeks, new acronyms and new lingo, bizarre file formats, weirdo tools, half-baked solutions, the same data sharing problems and on and on. Wading through all of this; and compositing what is out there, my friend has produced this Garmin Image Map of Tasmania; which is viewable in cgpsmapper ( although you may have to force it to show layer 0 for some weird reason ): http://hook.org/anselm/projects/20071231_Tasmania/tas.img One of the better sources for data appears to be : http://garminmapsearch.com/ Which helped me find map data such as for example this Tasmania map: http://mapcenter2.cgpsmapper.com/getfile.php?type=zip&comp=7165 As well there is a not free collection of data from Garmin; focusing largely on places that are already so well traveled that one really questions why maps are needed... but anyway: http://www8.garmin.com/cartography/mpc/ One annoyance is that the .img format they use is once again yet another bizarre file format; somewhat difficult to deal with. This tool lets one deal with it: http://www.geopainting.com/en/ I can probably get it into QuantumGIS via gdal or the like but haven't quite puzzled through that yet. Another possibility would be to generate topo maps from DEM data... haven't tried that yet. It seems like it's a kind of dataset that has general utility... so either it must exist or should be made to exist. - a _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
