0ur opinion:

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GARMlN 010-11001-00 USGS T0P0GRAPHlCAL DATA AT A 1:100,000 SCALE USGS T0P0GRAPHlCAL DATA AT 1:100.000 SCALE

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Explore every nook and cranny of the U.S. with the help of Garmin's Topo U.S. 2008 topographical mapping software. The DVD features digital topographical maps for the entire U.S., including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, with a host of valuable details. lt's also easy and convenient to load data to your compatible Garmin device. Just pop the DVD in your PC, then connect your Garmin GPS receiver via its USB port. 0nce connected, you'll have access to topographical mapping detail no matter where your adventures take you. Details include:

• Digital topographic maps, comparable to 1:100,000 scale USGS maps
• Terrain contours and topo elevations
• Summit locations with elevations
• Trails and rural roads; city neighborhood roads
• lnterstates and major highways
• National, state, and local parks, forests, and wilderness areas
• Coastline, lake and river shoreline; wetlands; perennial and seasonal streams
• Searchable database of cities, geographic names, summits, lakes, and more
• Elevation profile on PC and compatible units; estimate terrain difficulty
• Allows you to plan your next outdoor adventure on your PC and download routes, waypoints, and map detail to your compatible Garmin GPS
• Lakes, reservoirs, waterways, rivers, and streams with icons to represent boat ramps, dams, campgrounds, and trails

Piece Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Buyer's feedback: - * Good, not great, topographic mapping ...
Huge improvement over basemap and pretty much a necessity for most uses. Shows all streets and urban details and also a fair amount of detail for hikers, such as contours, campgrounds, natural features and most, but not all, major trails. Now that the price has come down, the value is better. Hopefully, we'll soon get a chance for a 24K topo map like Garmin has for national parks. In the meantime, this is all we have. If you're looking for a lot of detail, in terms of 50' contours, you'll be disappointed. Loading on to Garmin handheld is easy.

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Buyer's feedback: - Topo U.S. - not for off road use
After looking over the Garmin web site, I purchased the suggested MapSource Topo maps on CD for almost $100, and was stunned at the poor detail and accuracy of these maps. First use on my Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx in my back yard, my Garmin unit indicated that I was across the street in a neighbor's yard perhaps 100-200 feet away, and that was in New Jersey with eight satellites in view. I walked to the nearest cross street, a major local road, and the unit located it perfectly. It (the map) could not accurately locate the 100+ acre lake near my home. These maps cannot be useful to anyone attempting to navigate off road, hiking on trails, or travelling on streams/small rivers. The maps simply bear little resemblance to actual geography except they do seem to indicate location of 25 foot topogtaphical elevation lines fairly well (not too useful). I kayak a great deal and had hoped to use the unit to navigate around New Jersey rivers and the sedge islands in Barnegat Bay. Forget about it! There is no correspondence between the Topo map and the actual geography! Totally useless for kayaking intercoastal bays or any of south Jersey's fabulous streams. If the maps can't locate major geographic features accurately, how is it going to keep someone on a hiking trail in the New Jersey Pine Barrens? I think there is considerable danger here of causing someone to get lost (and possibly hurt) rather than find their way.

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Buyer's feedback: - * Garmin MapSource Topo U.S. 2008 ...
I have the Garmin Vista C, with the earlier version Mapsource software. I found the new 2008 a real plus. I drove from Nevada to Ohio, used my laptop and my Garmin together. It is simple to use and is accurate, go for it. I can't wait to use some of the other features.

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Buyer's feedback: - Horrifyingly slow and lacks details
I have a Zumo 550 that I wanted to load maps into. I have an 8gb SDHC card in the card slot, so plenty of memory for lots and lots of maps. I loaded California and Nevada into the card and checked out some areas that I know well around Death Valley. The map didn't even include Ballarat, as well as missing most of the mines and mining camps and springs in the area. Granted, most of what is missing is also missing on the USGS 100k quads, but the USGS 100k quads at least include Ballarat.

But still, it's the only maps pre-formatted for the Garmin GPS, so I checked the SD card. Two states was only 256mb. Great, I thought. I can put half the United States in there and still have plenty of memory for mp3's. *WRONG*. At 10:30am today I set it going. It is 6pm now, and still says it has almost an hour to go before it even starts transferring (it's been slowly crawling through "Building map set" for all that time). And I do *not* have a slow computer -- I have a Core 2 Duo 2.1ghz with 2gb of memory, and according to the Windows Task Manager less than half that memory is in use, and neither CPU is maxed out. It's just slow.

The only reason this thing gets two stars is because it's better than nothing. I reserve 1 star for the utterly useless. Unfortunately Garmin refuses to releases 24k-scale topo maps for most areas of the United States, even though the fact that they release such topos for the national parks shows that they do have the technology to do so. I guess they figure that the only place anybody wants to go hiking is in national parks. Sigh. I suppose they'll release full 24k topo maps on a state-by-state basis around the same time they release a Mac version of MapSource (i.e., "real soon now" -- for the past two years -- requiring me to use Boot Camp to boot into Windows XP to program the GPS). Grrr!

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Buyer's feedback: - * A lot of maps for the price ...
This software provides topo maps for the entire US for less than $60, which seems like a bargain to me. The maps do not have the detail of USGS 7.5 minute series maps but generally have enough detail for hiking, biking, or off-road driving. The maps actually look better on a GPS than on my PC using MapSource, because the roads are better distinguished from the contour lines.
The only problem I had installing the software is that it turns off the detail in MapSource. To correct this you need to go to the View menu and click "Show GPS Map Detail" (Ctrl+G).