Reviews

I love Amazon reviews. If a product works, I can praise it. If it doesn't, I can dis it. I am dissin' Topo US 2008 by Garmin. It is not accurate. I know it is 1:100,000 (o.k.a. One over the World scale) but still, it would be nice if it had some passing resemblance to the stuff on the ground. I survey rail-trails (bike) for fun, so I get a lot of GPS time on the trail. My Garmin 60CSx GPS is a superb machine. Five stars, no question. The Topo US 2008 that came with it sucks. Case in point ... Irvine, CA. In the Woodbridge Community there are two lakes, North and South. Only North Lake is shown on Topo 2008. One lake missing. Case in point ... Irvine, CA. The street grid overlays Sand Canyon Reservoir. No, they have not developed a tract down in the water. The street grid overlay seems to be displaced. Case in point ... Irvine, CA. I am surveying the Freeway Trail, which runs close along the north side of the San Diego Freeway. The map is showing me well south of the freeway. Duh! The waypoints from the CSx, when uploaded to Google Earth are spot-on. No issues with the data; big issues with the maps. Garmin would love to sell me a suite of electronic marine charts. Not buying. If the accuracy of those is anywhere near that of Topo US 2008, I would be on the rocks in a flash.

I am going through the reviews here and one thing that I can see is that a lot of folks have totally unrealistic expectations for this product. A typical "quad" map that you would use for hiking is at a scale of 1:24,000. The maps used in this product are 1:100,000 which are suitable for hiking in some cases. Mostly they are going to let you know general proximity to features such as mountains, rivers major roads and so on which might possibly save your bacon if you are lost. You are dreaming folks if you think you are going to get 1:24,000 scale quad maps for the entire US for $75 that all fits on to your little GPS unit. For instance 1:24,000 maps that cover all of the state of Oregon from the National Geographic State series is over 3GB of data and costs about $100. The amount of data that you can fit on SD cards now is amazing but not that amazing that you could fit the entire US 24k maps on a micro SD card. By the way the paper version of those maps used to cost about $10 just for one map that covered approximately 7 miles in a north south direction and was two and half feet tall. Digital versions of these that are easy to use for the general public have only been around for about 15 years. How quickly we expect miracles in the digital age! Garmin does make a 24k product divided up into regions like the west coast states for $94 (Garmin MapSource TOPO! US 24k West Topographic Coverage for Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada (DVD)) which is availble on Amazon. Even this is pretty amazing to fit on to a micro sd card assuming that you can in fact load it all on.

Although I feel the prices for these Garmin maps are way too expensive they do work well with my Garmin 60CSx GPS. To avoid any install or operational problems I just bit the bullet and bought their map. So everytime I use the GPS now, it works perfectly and that's worth a lot to me to have that kind of confidence in my gear.

I have to say that I am NOT pleased with the Garmin Topo US 100K software. I cannot get it to install properly on my computers and I have not been able to use it yet. I've e-mailed Garmin and they say to call in . . . their call-in times are during the day and hard for me to make contact with them. I guess once I get some time to call in, maybe I'll be happier. Right now I am not impressed.

I purchased this product as a means to operate a 255w off-road. Not only are the maps not detailed enough, the graphics are poor even on the best graphic system. As a general overview of an area, this product will do just fine, however, if you really want detailed topographical maps, this is NOT the product for you. Very disappointed for its intended use, and even more for trying to use it with a real off-road gps. I have multiple computers (PC and Apple) and the product worked the same on both, poorly. I wrote to Garmin to express my total dissatisfaction with the product and have heard nothing from them.