Mapsource topographic US 2008 (DVD-Rom). Digital topographic maps, comparable to 1:100000 scale USGS maps. Terrain contours, topographic elevations, summit locations with elevation, trails as well as rural roads; city neighborhood roads. Coastline, lake and river shoreline; wetlands; perennial and seasonal streams. Elevation profile on PC and compatible units; estimate terrain difficulty features lakes, reservoirs, waterways, rivers and streams with icons to represent boat ramps, dams, compgrounds and trails.
TOPO 2008 has some good points: it's half the price of most of Garmin's different cartography products, and it does not require an unlock code. Read some of the reviews on Garmin's "City Navigator North America" product - here are some real horror stories about the problems individuals have had with Garmin's unlock code system.
NOTE: In some discussion of how TOPO 2008 interfaces with a GPS, the unit used in this review is a Garmin 60CX.
What you get with TOPO USA 2008 that's good:
1. It adds a lot of city streets and county roads that are not included in the base map. However, the positional accuracy of these roads is often pretty bad. But at least having them would probably support you find an address if you got lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood or rural area. Unfortunately though, the road network in TOPO 2008 IS NOT AUTO-ROUTEABLE. In other words, if you try to generate a point-to-point trip route in either MapSource or in the GPS itself, the route will not follow the roads or calculate turns. It will just make a strait line (actually a Great Circle curve) from Point "A" to Point "B". This does not prevent you from generating your own routes manually, of course. I guess the lack of auto-route capability is why TOPO 2008 is half the price of City Navigator.
2. Since TOPO 2008 contains a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the coverage area, it allows you to generate a profile of your hiking/biking trail or road trip route. This profile capability is nice when comparing alternate routes, and the profiles can be generated and viewed in the GPS or on the PC in MapSource
3. The outlines of many coastlines, lakes, and rivers in the basemap are very coarse and downright inaccurate - TOPO 2006 offers a huge improvement to these outlines (but does not include water depth).
4. TOPO 2008 includes thousands of searchable place names and POI's that are not in the base map.
What's not so good in TOPO 2008:
1. The coverage area is ONLY the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii). Unfortunately, there is no coverage in Canada or Mexico, other than large cities and major highways that are already in the basemap. If you need coverage of your neighbor to the north, the TOPO Canada DVD is pretty not cheap at $110, nearly double the price of the USA version.
2. The contour interval is 1:100,000, which is probably fine for planning an automobile trip, but is very coarse if you are doing a hiking or bicycle trip. Garmin does offer 1:24,000 cartography, but it's expensive and covers only a limited set of National Parks. If TOPO 2008 were to cover the whole USA at 1:24,000, the amount of data would probably require many DVD's instead of only 1, and the retail price would no doubt be a lot more, so I guess the 1:100,000 scale is adequate for most users, and certainly more economical.
If you already own the City Navigator cartography, TOPO 2008 may be a nice addition to your chartplotter-capable Garmin GPS, especially if it can show route profiles like the 60CX. However, if your primary need is for automobile routing, and especially if you need coverage in Canada, and if you have a limited budget, you would be better off purchaseing City Navigator if you do not already own it. It's twice the price of TOPO 2008, but has a lot more capability.
NOTE: For some reason, TOPO 2008 includes Alaska's Dalton Highway, from Fairbanks to Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay), yet City Navigator, which costs twice as much and is supposed to offer coverage of completely of the USA and Canada, does not.
SUMMARY: A good value at $59.10 if you just want to upgrade your GPS's background map, and if you don't require Canadian coverage. Also a nice add-on if you already have City Navigator, as it allows you to compute road profiles anywhere in the USA (including Alaska and Hawaii). City Navigator does not have a terrain model built in, so it can not show profiles on it's own. For owners of large RV's or people who tow large boat or livestock trailers over long distances, TOPO 2008's road profile capabilities could be a really nice trip planning tool.
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