Anyone downloaded the topo that garmin offers. I am considering it for my 396.

When canyon flying in unfamiliar country, it would be nice to have a more detailed map on the gps to help avoid flying up dead end canyons/plan your route etc. Wondering if the topo dowload makes this more of a reality?

http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/us/maps/onthetrailmaps

I would not fly up a canyon cus my GPS says it is OK. I would not follow a friend up a canyon either.

A few years back a gaggle of Bonanzas were heading someplace in the Santa Barbara area and one of them said " hey follow me, I am familiar with the area". He flew up a canyon and the others (maybe not all) followed and they all met the same fate. Lots of scrap alumimum.

I am already over gadgeted. I have been trying to break a bad habit of looking too much inside the plane.

Tim

I have a Garmin 396, a Nuvi 889, and the Garmin "Topo U.S. 24K West" - - it includes detailed topo info for CA, NV, OR, and WA. There's a lot of detail, and that takes up a lot of storage. There are 1814 maps which total 3923.5 k in size.

All of that 4 state topo map will fit on a 2 GB micro SD card and go into the Nuvi. Unfortunately, Garmin was still in their "proprieatary" storage card, you gotta buy it from us, phase when they came out with the 396. Even though I purchased the largest storage card Garmin had available at the time, it will hold only a very small area of Topo map coverage.

In my opinion, not very practical to use for terrain avoidance while flying.

bumper

highroad wrote:Anyone downloaded the topo that garmin offers. I am considering it for my 396.

When canyon flying in unfamiliar country, it would be nice to have a more detailed map on the gps to help avoid flying up dead end canyons/plan your route etc. Wondering if the topo dowload makes this more of a reality?

http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/us/maps/onthetrailmaps

I have the Mapsource topo info from the CD on my 296. I like it, but you do have to zoom in a long ways before it becomes visible. Not sure I'd say it is a "must have", just more information you may use at some point. It does take up some room, I think I've got an 8MB card.

gb

I use it on my 196. It is very cluttered, so I can't imagine using it for terrain avoidance. I only turn it on when I'm curious about the name of "that little lake over there", or "what's the name of that mountain".

tom

highroad,
I use garmin topo maps alot for hunting and just playing around in the hills, never really thought about it's use in an airplane.
Loading them in a gps for your plane sounds like a great idea, you would see the roads, streams and contours in alot more detail than with a chart.
I have found that the garmin topo maps are good for land mark names(streams,lakes,ridges, etc.) Garmin city select is better for road names, but little other detail. Garmin trip and way point manager will clutter your screen up to the point that it is useless.
I have used road maps when flying in unfamiliar areas, and have found that they are helpful when using roads for navigation, seems to me that if your gps shows you exactly what road you are over and at what point you are at on that road, it could be a big help, but I haven't tried it.
I use a 296 can I download garmin topo to it?

I am not saying I want to fly with eyes staring at my instruments, and I am not advocating flying up canyons that you cannot turn around in.

Let me try again.

Okay, lets say you want to fly from JC to Big Creek and then on to Vines and it is your first time in the area. You are flying an airplane like most of us fly that will not climb from 5000ft to 9500ft in the few miles it takes to get to yellow pine that would allow you to go direct. You could circle above your campsite at JC for 10-15 min..........Or you could start flying the canyons gaining altitude and seeing the sights. Your trusty navigator has the sectional on his/her lap and is doing their best to point you up the correct canyon. You as PIC, know your airplane and your own comfort level and make sure that you do not fly into any canyons that you cannot turn around in. Should be a good adventure.......

JC is the balloon at the very bottom of the map. You take off and head North up the canyon to Yellow pine where you turn east. If you are looking at your sectional, you may make the mistake of following the first canyon marked by the balloons that head north. You have Big Creek in the GPS and your heading is somewhat close to what it should be although you are constantly turning so it is hard to tell. After several miles are thinking.....my airplane really performs like a turd......well, you are still well below the canyon walls and you can see ahead that the canyon ends. No big deal because you are prepared for this. Going to slow flight mode is no big deal because, well, you have been in slow flight since you left JC. Lower the flaps, get stabilized and turn around. But now your confidence is a bit shaken in your navigator. They show you the sectional and you realize that you would have made the same mistake........So you go back to yellow pine and head east further and find the correct canyon.

If your sectional had had an airplane moving in your position transposed over it, you would not have made the mistake because you would have known exactly what canyon you were approaching and where that canyon went (assuming you had zoomed in and out appropriately)

In the map below, you can see where there are several spots going to and coming back from Big Creek where you could make a mistake. If you scroll north on the map, you will see the red balloon that is Big Creek. The furthest east balloon is Vines.

[googlemap]http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=45.032774,-115.392838&spn=0.341619,0.890579&t=p&z=11&msid=116647106477174755918.000475dc5eb151cc39e6e[/googlemap]

Some fly with a PC tablet that has their airplane on top of a sectional. Is there a way to make GPS do something similiar?

Small Tail Caddy wrote: seems to me that if your gps shows you exactly what road you are over and at what point you are at on that road, it could be a big help, but I haven't tried it.
I use a 296 can I download garmin topo to it?

Exactly what I am thinking about showing what road/valley/mountain/stream you are over.

I think all the Garmin x9x's are downloadable. You just need a cable to go from the gps to the computer. Creat an account at garmin.com and you can download a lot of things.

I Loaded the Mapsource Topo maps on my 196. But to see any deatil you have to zoom in so far that is not practical for flying. When you zoom out far enought to see what is coming up (3 to 5 mile scale) it is so cluttered that you cant tell what is what.. Better off to study you sectional and add a few user waypoints before take off at some key locations to get you down the right drainage.

Another solution would be to connect your gps to a laptop and run a mapping program like topo! from National Geographic State Series. Topo uses scans of the whole series of USGS quadrangle maps, and with a better, bigger screen, as on a laptop, you could get the terrain in detail enough to see what is coming up next. Your progress on the map is continuously updated.

As others have pointed out, fundamentally, the small screen is too cramped. Got Laptop?

tom

Set the Topo not to display until maybe 1.2 miles or less, to get rid of all the clutter at 3 or 5 miles. I know it works on a 496 and 696 - haven't tried it on the lower numbered units. I have the 1:100,000 and it does have many more stream names and peak names than the base map. With the larger proprietary card in the 496, I was able to load the Rockies, west to the Pacific at one time.

I am a floatplane pilot who routinely flies the B.C coast and through the coast range mts to the interior. Traditional GPS systems do not really apply to my type of flying. I use Memory Map Navigator combined with a tablet PC. I have loaded all of the topo' s for Washington, B.C. Yukon and Alaska. You can draw any route you want to fly including waypoints etc, ahead of time. While flying you can follow the route. Its simple, easy to use, and incredibly helpful. I flew from Anchorage to SEattle using it, and it worked great. Take a look at MemoryMap.com.
Jim

Thanks guys.
Seems like if you can fit it in your panel, the 696 may be the way to go with the large screen. Thought I read somewhere on the Supercub board that the 696 was not supporting garmins topo? Guess I could call Garmin but there is no way the 696 is going to fit in the panel of my pacer, well at least not reasonably.

You should get what this guy uses. Kept him out of trouble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nm8pNgqBAk

Tim

qmdv wrote:You should get what this guy uses. Kept him out of trouble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nm8pNgqBAk

Tim

Wow!

Could not resist being a smart ass. Sorry. Did you notice, no N number.

Tim

You should get what this guy uses. Kept him out of trouble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nm8pNgqBAk

Tim

Holy crap!

It'll be interesting to hear the rest of the story...

Sonfoabitch!!!

Adding this one to the videos forum too...

Oregon180 wrote:

You should get what this guy uses. Kept him out of trouble.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nm8pNgqBAk

Tim

Holy crap!

It'll be interesting to hear the rest of the story...

And then they all went home, burned their shorts, and lived happily ever after.
tom

I really like topo for my 296, but a few caveats along the way. First, no matter how great the topo map and the GPS, it's not a perfect reliable replacement for looking out the window, so look at it for reference now and then, but spend most of your time with your eyeballs out the window! Second, as orienteering painfully taught me, a topographic map is not always correct - and I've had pilots tell me that there are a couple spots out in Alaska where the mountain isn't quite where topo shows it to be.

It's nice for distinguishing the false pass from the true pass, and when you know that the cabin is on the lake, actually being able to see the lake you are flying to on the GPS!

The newer versions of topo - anything on the DVD disks - is way too cluttered when I've got my detail at highest setting - but after poking in the settings, it's really nice (Down in the map setup menu, there's a topo tab that lets you take out most of the numbers and minor lines, or have the lines show up further out.)

The 696 takes topo on a SD card instead of the Garmin proprietary chip.

As for the idiot on youtube - no matter how awesome your GPS, IFR or VFR, it won't help you if you decide to climb VFR into IMC in rising terrain. Next time the pilot gets the idea to do that, I hope he has the decency to kill himself on the ground, without risking taking any passengers with him!