Dirtman:

I have been using Garmin GPSRs in Canada for the last 5 years. I just finished a trip from Toronto to Winnipeg a week ago, during which I compared three Garmin cartography products: CityNavigator North America v7, MetroGuide Canada v4, and Topo Canada v2. I was using a Garmin 2720, and I had all three products loaded on it, so I could switch from one to another as I wanted to. Note that it is not possible to view more than one product at the same time on any GPSR, meaning, you can't overlay Topo over MG or CN. It's like a television, you can only watch one channel at a time.

The short story is this: It's very much a 'horses for courses' issue. No one product is better than the other, and to try to compare them would be like trying to compare screwdrivers with different bits on the end. Since I doubt you want to buy all three, I'll try to give you a quick summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the three different products.

City Navigator North America v7
The first word in the name of this product is your big clue. This is the absolute top of the line product if you want automatic route calculation for travel within large urban areas (greater than 300,000 people). Each entry for a street or road contains not only the vector drawing of the roadway, but up to 60 different characteristics of each street - the speed limit, number of stop signs and traffic lights, turn restrictions, whether a median exists, whether the road is paved or not, whether it has bus bays or left turn lanes, etc. If you want the best possible automatic route generation within large cities, this is the product to get. The cartography comes from Navteq.

MetroGuide Canada v4
This product also supports automatic route generation. It doesn't have the incredible level of invisible detail (road attributes) that CN has, but it does contain a heck of a lot better coverage of smaller towns than CN does. For example, CN has virtually no coverage of Winnipeg other than the major arterial roads. MG Canada v4 has every street in the city. CN has nothing whatsoever for small towns in Canada (towns of less than 50,000 people that are not part of a larger urban area, e.g. Toronto suburbs), MG Canada v4 has street level detail for just about every town that is big enough to have a gas station in it. The cartography was compiled by DTMI Spatial (a Canadian company) based on information they collected from a variety of sources - including Navteq.

Topo Canada v2
This product does not support automatic route generation, either on a GPSR or on a personal computer. That's a major drawback if you want to use it for navigation, rather than just spatial orientation. However, if you want to get off paved roads and ride trails, logging roads, that kind of stuff, this is the product that has the best coverage of unpaved roads. It also has phenomenal coverage of streams, rivers, lakes, no matter how small, not to mention amazing coverage of forest service roads (fire roads), private roads put in by logging companies, listings of ruins and abandoned townsites, dams, fire ranger towers (and the access roads to them), and so forth. If it's not paved, you'll find it on Topo Canada v2. For paved road navigation, though, it's the pits - it will tell you where the town is, and you can figure out where you are (more or less) in the town, but that's about it.

If you are the type of person who likes to use paper topo maps, and wants the GPSR to simply confirm your location on the paper topo map so you can be reasonably sure that you are following the route you have planned out on the paper map, then Topo Canada v2 is probably the best product for you. The information in Topo Canada v2 was collected entirely from topographical maps published by the Government of Canada. Because these have a much slower revision cycle than the information for highways and city streets that is used for the other two products, Topo will often be out of date with respect to paved roads. But, the landmass doesn't change much from year to year, and the dirt roads don't get improved and changed much from year to year either.

You need to remember, though, that if you want prompted navigation on any kind of road(turn left here, etc.), or you want to look up points of interest (where's the closest gas station), Topo doesn't support that kind of function. Your GPS V may support rudimentary autorouting in the absence of routable cartography (by using its basemap), but that is 'town to town', not 'street to street'.

I hope this information assists you in making a decision. It kind of sounds to me, based on what you have written above, that you want support for navigation off of unpaved roads. If that is the case, then I think Topo would be best for you. For sure, you don't want City Navigator or City Select, which is very, very similar to City Navigator.

Michael

[This message has been edited by PanEuropean (edited 25 March 2006).]