Map questions

[DesertCruiser]

What does it mean in the description by Trails? Are these referring to hikng, walking, or off-road trails? Or all of them. On your Utah Garmin Compatible Maps page it doesn't have a check next to trails for the Utah 2011 map I just downloaded.

Second I see  you have a US Planimetric Desert Southwest map listed. Not familiar with that term? Could you explain what that means.
TIA  (thanks in advance)

Don....

[maps4gps]

I'm am a little on the conservative side.  I think by trails most users are looking for hiking, horse, bike, 4wh trails like are  on a National Geographic trails map, etc. . Unfortunately, there is no public source of detailed trail info for the Nation. The transportation data from Census has a few of these, however, it is far from complete as their mission (funding) is related to head and house counts for Congress. 

A planimetric map is similiar to a topo map, but does not have contour lines.  Other examples of planimetric maps would be Garmin City Navigator, OpenStreetMap (OSM)  & Ibycus USA.

If you do not need the area north of 40 degrees, try Seldom's Desert SW mapset.  He has made his routable and added trails from OSM data.

[DesertCruiser]

Okay, thanks for that quick reply. Planimetric maps wouldn't interest the desert readers on our site then. As for the trails -- I ask because I have noticed that on some of these maps that 4x4 roads that are shown on the MapSource 2008 topo are not on the maps here. Not a problem to me, but that's why I asked, and the description not having a check made me wonder.

Like you maps and the time you've put into them, thanks. There have been several people on the Utah 4x4 forum that have looked at our site and asked for the Utah only map. I did download the 2011 version!
Thanks again,
Don....

[DesertCruiser]

I see you added a note for Seldom's Desert Southwest map. We already have that map, and have it listed on our http://www.in-the-desert.com/garmintopomaps.html WEB SITE. It's the ideal map for me, but someone asks about  the entire state of Utah, so we gave them your map link here.

Thanks again,
Don....

[DesertCruiser]

maps4gps: I was looking at an area that we are going into and noticed a green outlined box with (st) inside it. I'm assuming that this State land?

Don....

[maps4gps]

Correct; the file I got from BLM says the State is the surface manager.  Use some caution with the surface management agency as I and others have noticed differences depending on where the info came from (even within BLM).

Although a few years older, you might also look at IndyJpr's Utah topo.  He used Utah Dept of Transportation data which for the Moab area is much, much better than what is in the Census files for that area.

[DesertCruiser]

Thanks again. I have spent some time looking at the topo you made and it has a lot of the jeep trails shown that are not on some of the other maps, nice! I'm sure it'll be a great advantage for our needs.
Don....

[DesertCruiser]

Rather than start a new thread, another question that has been eating at me for a while now.  On our daytrips pages where we supply trips with GPS tracks for the trips, I've always included a track in the .mps format. Also available to me are 3 other formats, like .gdb in version 2 and version 3 and also a .gpx format. I've never had any complaints about using the .mps format, but what is the difference? Is one better than the other? Is one more usable on all the different Garmin GPS units?

Thanks,
Don....

[Boyd]

Personally I'd use .gpx because it's a standard that was developed specifically to exchange data between different software packages. Garmin has standardized on .gpx as the file format for all their new devices. Instead of the earlier proprietary systems, their units are file-based now, with all waypoints, tracks and routes are stored in separate .gpx files on each day that you record data. Makes it easy to use your data in other programs when it's organized like this.

[Seldom]

As you know, Don.  Not all of us recognize the MPS format , even if our software does.

[DesertCruiser]

Well thank you both, from now on I'll save them as gpx files, and change the existing ones as I can --- we have a lot of tracks already listed on the site in mps format. It will take some time for the change,
Thanks,
Don....

[DesertCruiser]

Gentlemen: I've run into a little problem using a .gpx format file for a download on our daytrips pages. If you got to this page  http://www.in-the-desert.com/2000flushes.html on our site and click on the Download the Garmin GPS file HERE at the top of the page, you can no longer download the topo track file. When this file is a .mps file it is downloadable. Have any ideas? When you click on this now it opens a meta data file in your browser than won't do anyone any good?

Don....

[Seldom]

I'm not an HTML guy, but when I left click on it Firefox opens the file as text.  It must have an association that GPX is XML.  When I right click and SaveAs the file downloads fine and I can open in MapSource.  Is there a way to make that link default to SaveAs instead of open?

[Boyd]

.gpx files are actually .xml files that contain a special type of information. I get the same results as Seldom - I can SAVE AS a .gpx file however. So I guess the browser just tries to display the xml when you click on that link, since that's one of the things it can do.

[DesertCruiser]

As far as I know there is no way to make it default to Save As. And I tried the right click method in 5 different browsers (we need to check these things in all the major browsers) In Internet Explorer when you right click it wants to save the .xml file. No good. 72% of our visitors use Internet Explorer to browse our site.

So what I'm thinking is to leave them alone -- to remain as .mps files for download.

Now the question is: Are people with newer model Garmin's like the Nuvi 500 going to be able to use them? Can they open an .mps file in BaseCamp? I don't have BaseCamp.

Thanks for your help.
Don...