Hi there,
planning for Nov. expedition to Sahara and West Africa. Will have a Garmin GPS with Tracks4Africa, but also bought a Panasonic Toughbook with built in GPS and am looking for best software and maps to load to provide more detailed route planning and desert navigation, primarily for Mauritania. - Ouadane, down to Tichit and area.

Wondering what GPS mapping software is recommended. Seems that Garmin has dropped their PC offering. What about OziExplorer or QuoVadis? Are there others? What about digital maps and sources? I have seen references for Russian maps. Are these any good? Are there others? I don't mind paying, although free is always good.

Any advice is appreciated.

thanks, Rick.

Tracks 4 Africa is ok for central and south of the continent, its poor for north Africa. Recommend to use OSM and the Morocco topo map and to combine it with recorded tracks from travellers recently visited the region by the same mean of transport as you will.
The Russian maps: a lot of people are enthousiastic about them, I am not.

Assuming the OS on your Toughbook is windows xp, 7 or 8? Use Garmin nRoute, it will work from the same map database as Mapsource and/or Basecamp, so you don't have to install anything extra.

Depending on your Garmin device you can use it in combination with your toughbook, or you can use the build-in GPS receiver, converting with Franson GPS-gate.

GRTZ,

JP

Thanks JP. So OSM is Open Street Maps? Which Morocco topo map? are there any similar for Western Sahara and Mauritania?

Yes, Win 7. Having trouble finding nRoute to download. Found one version, but it would not install without a prior version present. Can non-Garmin digital maps be loaded? GPS Gate allows nRoute to use internal GPS NMEA signals?

Sorry for my ignorance, but is there a section of the forum where people post GPS route coords?

Thanks!

OSM is an abbreviation for Open Street maps.

Read http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...native-61822-2

The term 'Western Shara' should not be used in Morocco . Look at the history of this area.

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There are two kinds of digital 'maps' - vector (which most GPSs use) and raster (same kind of thing as a digital photo -jpg, gif, tiff, ecw and other formats, but with added information). Paper maps may be available in a digital raster format.

Oziexploreer (and others) do the raster maps - similar to paper maps (indeed you can photograph the paper map to use in OZiexplorer). They have one 'layer', they don't change the amount of data viewed if you zoom in.

Vector maps can change the amount of detail they have as you zoom in and out .. if all the data was views=ed all the time you'd have a dense black mass of mess when you zoomed out as there'd be too much to see... so a different concept compared to paper/raster maps.

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The OSM advantages.

You can change it. You can add to it. OSM want you to do that .. provided you use copyright free material (eg your GPX tracks or the satellite views they provide).
It is free.

The disadvantages.
People make mistakes.
Some people vandalize.
It will take some time for the changes to come through (the .nl site looks to be about 1 day .. other sites might be 1 month)
It changes ... the more people 'working' on an area the more rapidly it changes.
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Please read through the blue bar things a the top of the page .. under 'GET READY' you'll find
http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/get-ready/gps-routes

There is a LOT of good information there .. reading thought it will save you asking question that have already been answered.

grtz,

jp

had successfully installed Mapsource 6.15 and nRoute 2.7.6, loaded Olaf Morocco map, OSM map and some Europe maps. and things were working great. Then tried loading the viagens4x4 Marraca map and it screwed up other maps and nRoute. I tried deleting/uninstalling everything, and re load from scratch, but cannot get nRoute working again. Keep getting error message "There is a problem with the nRoute registry. Please reinstall nRoute and start it again." I do, but it still just gets same error.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Rick.

Hi,

You posted the same problem here and that's where I answered:

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...native-61822-3

No succes?? Didn't try?

Let me know please.

GRTZ,,

JP

thanks JP! I will try fixing tonight and let you know. I thought I knew a bit about computers and software, but this problem has been very frustrating...

Again both tool you can find on my site:

Welkom bij camperreis.nl - Download GPS software

GMTK under 11

MSTK under 2

GRTZ,

JP

Problem solved see post in the linked thread above.