Review of DeLorme's Topo 5.
Topo 5 is a great resource for planning adventure, but when you get right down to it you may want to take DeLorme up on theri offer if high resolution imagery. And as a consolation to the program's lack in GPs eXchange-ability, Topo 5 has excellent 3-D rendering.
First Impressions of Topo 5
The installation went fine, no problems. Then I installed the southeast region, again, no problem.
Topo's interface will look very familiar to experienced Street Atlas users. Zooming-in to Smokey Mountains region, I ...
... then I zoomed in further to the Cataloochee area where I did some hiking several years ago - before GPS. I wanted to retrace my route for posterity. When I had zoomed in close enough I noticed that the trails I hiked during this trip were represented on the maps. The first silly thing I did was try to draw a routable trail over an existing trail up to Mt Sterling. Soon I realized that the trail segments were clickable.
Clicking on a trail segment, highlights the trail and some statistics are displayed. "Wow, you can't do that on a paper map!" I said to myself.
My next learning task was to figure out how to stitch trail segments together. Using route creation techniques I learned from Street Atlas, I attempted to make a route from the trailhead to the summit of Mt. Sterling and back. I was only partially successful, because I did not notice the drop down box next to the route calculation button. When I selected to calculate a "trail", the result was perfect.
Now what about a water trail?... Nope can't do a water trail.
What about another trail, outside a national park. I zoomed into another familiar area along the North Carolina, South Carolina boarder - the Foothills Trail. I was able to locate the trailhead in Table Rock State Park but alas, the locally, well-known trail was not a map feature in Topo 5.
Oh well, lets play. What all this about "3-D"? Wow. The 3-D rendering is a fast as I've ever seen. My old laptop usually doesn't do anything very quickly, but I can make Topo 5's 3-D view angle spin like a top. Wheeeeeee.
Alright now on to more serious stuff... I imported some data from by DeLorme BlueLogger as a draw layer. The data imported as several points from a nature trail at Roper Mountain Sience Center. What I wanted was connected line showing where I walked not a bread crumb trail. It looks like I was acquiring data every 2-3 seconds. There were so there were many data points, and with all the labels, it made it difficult to see individual points - even at zoom level 16. So, I tried to clean up this mess.
It wasn't apparent to me, at first, how to edit the draw objects. Then I read a bit of help about 'Manage Draw' but this was just too big a task. Seems like there should be better way import BlueLogger Data directly as trail segments.
Well that's all I have time for now. Watch this space as I continue my quest to a routable trail from GPS data.
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