After much deliberation I decided to purchase Garmin's topo map of Morocco, quite a bit decision as it's £129.99 including postage.

I wasn't impressed with the terms of the licence which states the maps can only be installed on one PC; I would have liked to have installed the maps both on the widescreen desktop PC I use for route planning, plus on the notebook PC I use when travelling, but I can't.

Never mind, the real problem is that many of the map segments don't display at lower resolutions. You can see the effect below.


This shows the mapset zoomed out to 70km. No map detail from TMv2 appears to be shown, all road numbers are those
from about 10 years ago (the maps are possibly from City Navigator Europe).


As you zoom in to 50km, the detail for the north of the country appears but not the tranche around Marrakech.

As you progressively zoom in on the images below (30km, 20km, 10km) some segments display fine, other parts still
show ancient road numbers and no mapping detail.







Until finally all detail is displayed at 7km and closer but it is so far zoomed in that it is useless for route planning.


I've spent a frustrating day explaining the situation with Garmin, waiting fruitlessly for responses, sending more emails, uninstalling and reinstalling the software and finally calling the "sorry we are experiencing a high volume of calls" call centre again. After listening to muzak for 23 minutes, the support person suggested that the problem is with Mapsource (which he claimed is no longer a supported product) and if I tried BaseCamp it might work. This is despite the webpage posted above stating that Mapsource would be installed on some PCs (and in any case, the situation I've read elsewhere on Garmin's web pages is that no more releases are planned of Mapsource, which is a different from not a supported product).

I said that as the product didn't work and Garmin were unable to offer any solutions, I wanted a refund. Garmin asked if the product had been activated. I said of course it had been activated otherwise I wouldn't have been able to view the maps! Garmin then said they would refuse a refund.

Obviously I will fight this and they will lose, but all the goodwill I have towards Garmin over the past ten years is being stretched by their unreasonable behaviour.

And as a final postscript, there are no problems with either Olaf's Morocco Topo mapset or the Morocco mapset from viagens4x4. Both of these work perfectly with Mapsource. Personally I think the Garmin support people were just being lazy and couldn't be bothered to sort the problem.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)