Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great addition to my GPS receiver!, January 26, 2005
I have been using my copy of Topo 3D for 2 weeks now and have been very impressed with the detail of the maps. The street information is based on NavTeq and is much more up-to-date and accurate than previous software versions. The Topographic information is based on a 30 meter grid layout as opposed to the 90 meter grid layout of the previous Mapsend Topo. Needless to say, the topo information is much better.
The biggest Pros for this software:
Better Street Detail, More detailed topography, increased mapsize allows you to download maps up to the size of a 247MB file (with the appropriate SD Memory card) -- previous versions allowed only up to 64MB, 3D view is nice to help visualize an area (you can see it from above, rotate it around to get different angles, and place yourself inside the map to review a given route), lots of Points of Interest (so many that you have to set options on which ones to show so they don't clutter up the map), easy user interface with lots of options for creating routes/waypoints and transferring to your GPS.
Biggest Disappointments:
Trails are not shown on the software. It does give you markers for the trail heads, but it does not show the trails themselves. The software is teamed up with Trails.com as a selling feature which seemed pretty promising. This was HUGELY anti-climactic -- It requires a $30/yr subscription to use the information, and it only provides you access to books/articles/printed maps -- not the ability to download trails to your GPS Receiver. This is the biggest reason for a 4 star rating rather than a 5.
As an aside, the software doesn't sell that it does Autorouting, so I didn't dock it stars for this, but someday Magellan will get the idea that an all inclusive software package will provide the most user satisfaction. Why are Topo maping and Autoroute mapping treated as mutually exclusive products?
All in all, I am very pleased with this product and would recommend it to others. Good job Magellan!
|
|
|
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Addition to Explorist 210 But Read The Directions, August 4, 2006
I have been using the Explorist 210 with the Topo-3D USA Mapsend ver. 1.00 software for over a month now, and I am very impressed with both the unit and the software. I have used the software and GPS in the car, biking, and hiking in some of Idaho's wilderness areas and have been fairly amazed at the detail of the software.
There have been a few negative reviews regarding the Mapsend software with the Explorist 210 that, in my opinion, are not deserved. There is a booklet that is sent with the Explorist 210 and another copy is sent with the Mapsend software entitled, "Magellan eXplorist GPS Receiver - Using Mapsend." You must read this booklet in order to get the software to work with your eXplorist - it will not work if you try to intuitively figure out the software from the interface. This is why one of the reasons that I give the software a rating of 4 stars instead of five - the software has been patched to work with the eXplorist series of GPS and should be updated so that you can upload maps directly from the Mapsend interface.
To get it to work, when you select a map region to upload instead of writing that region to your GPS you write it to the hard drive. You then run a separate program included with your eXplorist software called Magellan Conversion Manager to upload the map region stored on your hard drive to your eXplorist GPS. The conversion manager recodes and compresses the maps for use with your eXplorist. It won't work if you try to upload the map from within Mapsend - you MUST use the Conversion Manager.
The contour lines and streams and bodies of water are vector versions of the USGS 7.5 min quadrangle maps and are dead on. The other features, such as springs, that have been taken from the USGS maps are accurate as well, at least the parts of northern Idaho that I have experience with. Trails, however, are limited (only one, out of several trails that were on a USGS map of an area where I was hiking, was on the Mapsend map of the same area) and that trail seemed to be a route that was converted from a track log - that is the trail appeared in Mapsend as a few points along a trail connected with straight lines. You'll occasionally hit the points as you meander along the trail, but you will find your path varies considerably from the Mapsend trail.
The other feature that is not especially useful is the "points of interest" that are in the Mapsend database. Many of them, such as shops and restaurants, are hopelessly outdated and no longer exist. One hot spring marked as a point of interest was at least 1/2 mile southeast and on the opposite side of the mountain from where it actually is located.
Fortunately, when you upload a map to your GPS you have your choice up uploading the topography, roads, or points of interest individually or in any combination. If you omit the topo lines and points of interest from your map upload, you can fit a lot of road data in the eXplorist 210s 22MB memory. Without contour lines and points of interest uploaded, I can fit all of Northern Idaho from the Montana border west through Washington to the Cascades. Including Seattle puts me over the limit - all the roads on the west side tend to use up memory - however there is enough memory to upload a map of all the roads from Salem, OR north through Portland, Olympia, and Seattle along the I5 corridor to the Canadian border, for example.
The roads included with the Mapsend software are from the NavTeq database and are much more up-to-date than USGS maps and cover all but the latest construction. My only complaint with the roads is that if a road is not paved it is listed as a 4WD road. We have a lot of unpaved roads out here that I happily zip up and down in my Mazda Protege. To me, a 4WD road requires at least 8 inches of clearance to keep large rocks from perforating your oil pan.
[...]
All in all this is an impressive piece of software and a great value if you compare to what else is available for other GPS units. If Thales updates it to work more seamlessly with the eXplorist GPS units, it will be a 5 star product.
|
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Look before you leap, December 31, 2005
I have a Magellan Sportrak Pro gps that I use with the earlier MapSend Topo v3.0. It's a pretty good combination, though the maps are less accurate than I would like.
When my daughter needed a gps for hiking, I bought her an Explorist 210, and the 3-D Topo. Unfortunately, this combination works much less well, and it is not clear to me that there is any combination of current Magellan hardware and software that is as good for the outdoorsperson as the older stuff.
On the positive side, the 210 unit is a good gps, and continues the Magellan tradition of working well under leaf cover: important for a hiker. The Mapsend 3-D Topo software is more accurate and more detailed than the older version.
On the downside, the new maps require much more memory, and the Explorist 210's built-in 22 MB memory is really not sufficient. I furthermore at first I thought that 3-D Topo only allows 1 map region to be loaded on the gps (as did another reviewer), because this is what the software tells you. Actually, however, you can put only one region in a given file, but can download several files to the gps. This improves the efficiency of memory use, but it is still cramped.
I was thinking of returning the Explorist 210 and getting a model that allows the use of an SD memory card, since the larger memory would make the 3-D Topo maps much more practical. But there are gotcha's there too (aside from the cost). The Explorist 400, 500, and 600, which take SD cards, have rechargeable batteries. This seems like a truly bad idea for a device that is designed to be used outdoors, away from AC power. Just what is one supposed to do if ones batteries die in the middle of the woods? The Explorist 210, like my Sportrak Pro, takes standard AA batteries, and one can just carry as many sets as one thinks one will need. (BTW, these can be inexpensive rechargeable NiMH batteries.)
There is one Explorist unit, the XL, that allows SD cards and AA batteries. But the XL literally stands for "extra large". It's a massive unit, really not friendly to a hiker.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Saving...
