This weekend will find Team DeLorme taking part in our fourth annual Sunday River Training Ride… a two-day, 150-mile round trip ride from DeLorme in Yarmouth, ME to the Jordan Grand Hotel at Sunday River Ski Resort in Bethel, ME. Each year I ride with my Earthmate PN-20 to help with directions, record my track, and provide trip statistics to keep us on schedule. This year I will be adding color aerial imagery of Sunday River and turning on a new feature, Hybrid Maps, so that I can see the contours on top of the imagery and have a better feel for the terrain.
For those of you who have downloaded the 1.4 firmware update, (hopefully that’s all of you!) the Hybrid Maps option is available in Map Setup. Enabling the option turns off the land cover in the Topo USA data and layers the rest of the Topo USA data on top of the aerial imagery. Translation… it allows you to see the roads, contours, and labels on top of the imagery… very cool for visualizing terrain changes while seeing the details in the imagery. Keep in mind that this feature is only available above the .25 mile scale. Here are a couple of screen shots I took while playing back my track log from last year.
The final leg of the ride is a five mile stretch with over 1000 feet of vertical gain. It was torture after the first 70 miles but very rewarding once we reached the swimming pool! My heart rate hit 189 bpm right around the point in the previous screen shots… check out the change in elevation described in the contour lines– it was pretty steep!
Here’s a zoomed out screen shot showing the golf course where I should have been relaxing… The course is hidden by the trees and last year I couldn’t see it in the Topo USA data or I might have stopped before the 189 heart rate!
When we got back I displayed the track in Topo USA. It allowed me to create some great 3-D views while analyzing the athletic data I gathered with my Suunto heart rate monitor. There’s already a post about using GeoTagger to tie athletic data to a track; check it out if you’d like to learn more about how I profiled my heart rate and speed.
I hope this example of using the Earthmate PN-20 with aerial imagery and the Hybrid Maps option will give you some ideas about how you might use this feature on your own!
-Chip
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September 12, 2008 at 8:12 pm |
Are you bicycling? And if you are, how are you attaching the GPS unit to your bike? Is there an adaptor that you sell? I’m looking around for a GPS solution for bike touring, and so far I’m not so impressed by what’s out there, with the exception of the DeLorme device.
November 23, 2008 at 7:34 pm |
The hybrid map feature would be a lot nicer if the color scheme didn’t use a dark gray color for minor roads. It is impossible to see them when layered over top of a dark gray aerial.
Someone is not doing a good job of vetting these color schemes. When you use the “topo” color scheme, you can see contours and foot trails and streams fine over top if imagery, but you can’t see the gray roads.
When you select the “high contrast” color scheme, the roads turn white, the streams remain blue, but now the foot trails are dark gray on top of dark gray imagery.
Is there a way to make the footrails and the roads visibile when overlaid on top of imagery?
November 30, 2008 at 12:23 pm |
Karl Miller: Thanks for the feedback; Feature Tables are one of our biggest challenges in the design department. We have to balance color combinations, line styles, patterns, and thicknesses for all geographic areas throughout the country. As you have pointed out, the patterns in the Topographic data are not the only areas that need to be addressed. The near infinite chart and imagery combinations available in the DeLorme Map Library data have made the Hybrid Map view challenging in some situations.
Our graphic designers and cartographers do an excellent job with the features that are available. As I described above, the topographic line styles we’ve chosen were necessary to balance the local roads with other map features. It is unfortunate that this style does not appear well on top of the gray imagery.
I will take your comments and look into creating additional Hybrid Map color schemes allowing a user to choose the one that is best for their particular imagery combination. Since no one feature table will work best with all imagery types, letting the user choose might be the best solution.
Thank you for your feedback,
Chip Noble
DeLorme
December 23, 2008 at 5:11 am |
How do I download the latest firmware?