Wingnut wrote:I get txt jobs which I need to reply to in an instant so if I'm riding I can see this rather than stopping to check my phone...
No phone call is worth your life or limb. Nor is your phone call worth my life.
Just as people existed without GPS they too existed without phones !!!!!!! Yes my Grandpar first drove a horse and buggy .. and when he drove a car he talked to it .... whoohar to stop!
Please stop for your phone or txt if you need to. If the phone call is a life or death matter than it's a 000 call and they are maned by people who are not driving, nor cooking etc. Educate your callers that a call may not be immediately answered. You wouldn't answer it with a hand full of toilet paper now would you?
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Hemma do a great job ... they actually travel the roads with GPSes and use those to create their maps. I've the 'Great Desert Tracks' series on CD. The set I have are raster not vector data. Not certain if Hemma offer it in vector form. Not certain I want it in vector form either.
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I like to travel with more than one map .. that gets a bit heavy. Putting the map/s on a memory card makes taking many maps just so easy and light. If the phone fails .. then the raster maps can be viewed using the camera .. just put the card in there with the correct directories. Even so, I still have one paper map that I travel with. But the other maps give a different perspective.
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For detail on OSM maps ... I look at where I want to go .. and add detail from the satellite maps (copyright permitted, not google sat but from others like Bing) to those parts of interest to me. Ok I cannot get all of the stuff you can get from the ground ...but I get enough to be able to interperate it when I'm there. This way I get detail to help find things. I've been surprise as to what is there already in some parts. But there is always more. I also take care of mapping my 'backyard', last month the NP&WS put some steps in on a track/path... yep they were in the OSM data base within 2 days.
The commercial Garmin maps are not bad for detail, but they cost. And they tend not to map remote bicycle stuff. And I can get the latest OSM map ... as in today.