Road Maps

[hawk]

Soon to be a 78s owner,formerly a PN-40 owner. What would be a good map set for general highway/POI data for New England and New York. I use a gps primarily for hunting and will use the best topo I can get here and in TopoFusion Pro but would also like to have up to date general road and poi info.

[maps4gps]

Most up to date for detailed transportaion and people type POIs would be Garmin's City Navigator.

Using publically available data:
My US Planimetric - North East built from Census 2009 data will cover your area of interest.
Add my overlay/transparent contour mapsets for New England and New York.

Census 2010 data is currently being released through February;  add some time (weeks to a month or so for a mapauthor to process it.

Various mapsets for trails useing different data sources are also available on this site.

On the home page, seach by each State and see what other mapsets are available for each.

[Boyd]

Garmin's 24k topo maps have the same routable roads as City Navigator. From what I can tell, the POI's are pretty much the same also - you can search for restaurants, gas stations, stores, etc. I have the Northeast 24k maps, and it sounds like that would be what covers your area as well. These maps also contain high resolution DEM data that will produce shaded terrain on your 78s and provide 3d views in Basecamp.

Most free maps are not capable of routing, they just show your position. The ones that do support routing will have numerous glitches and won't support address search (eg: you can't ask the GPS to take you to 123 Main St). The free maps won't have DEM data, because we still don't know how Garmin does this. And free maps won't have POI's for businesses, etc.

Now, personally, I don't like the style of the Garmin topo maps but that's just my own quirk. For what you describe, it may be a good solution since you'll get most of City Navigator's features for your region plus topo features. The roads on City Navigator and the 24k Topo's come from Navteq data. They are much, much more accurate than any of the public data sources that we mapmakers use. But they will probably show fewer dirt roads and trails, since Navteq's main interest is auto navigation.