Northern Ireland Outdoors Forum - Hiking, camping and more
General => Gear Questions, Information, Reviews and Competitions => Topic started by: RedLeader on January 06, 2010
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It's been a long time coming but you can finally get digital maps for Northern Ireland. At the moment only the 1:50,000 are available but hopefully the 1:25,000 will come soon. The ones I found are from Mapyx but I think Memory Map also sell them too now.
There's a good writeup here on Richard McCaughans blog:
http://maceachain.blogspot.com/2009/12/mapping-software-for-northern-ireland.html
Screenshot:
(http://i550.photobucket.com/albums/ii423/sputnik57/Misc/quo.jpg)
Link here:
http://www.mapyx.com/index.asp?tn=productview&pid=1248
I've taken one for the team and bought the map for £45.81 inc VAT. I didn't buy the Digital Terrain Model (£9.04) or Gazeteer (£5.63) which give a greater degree of elevation accuracy and a searchable database respectively. It will take a while to get used to the software so I will write a more in depth review later but initial my thoughts are:
- It's a shame they don't bundle all the elements in one package rather than hiding the fact that you might really need the DTM and Gazeteer.
- You can't export maps to a Garmin mapping GPS (although it would appear that all mapping products have this problem) although I'm not sure about GPS other than Garmin.
More later!
Update
1:25,000 map tiles are now available for The Mournes, Glens, Lough Erne and Sperrins @ £14.99 each.
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I've been using geohubNI http://www.geohubni.gov.uk/geohubni_register.htm
The OS maps are black and white, and the interface is poor, but it's been better than nothing.
It'll be good to see how the mapyx ones compare.
It's really annoting that the rest of the UK can see proper maps on Mapquest and Bing but somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea they just peter out. :(
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Just a brief addition now that I have been using this software for a few days.
It's bloody awesome!
Planning routes is now a breeze and although there's much that could be improved, going from paper maps and Google Earth to Quo has made life so much easier. You can print sections of maps reasonably easily (takes a bit of fiddling) and when you want a better size it will automatically print onto multiple pages. You can't replace proper maps for longer routes and sometimes 1:50,000 isn't quite detailed enough but at this point £46 for what is 18 maps works out to £2.56 per map so I'm not complaining.
Apart from a lack of detailed instructions my only issue at this point is that moving the map when you're zoomed out is quite slow.
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Around 60 quid for all of NI seems pretty respectable to me!
What spec computer are you running it on to recieve slow scrolling? lack of RAM?
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Around 60 quid for all of NI seems pretty respectable to me!
What spec computer are you running it on to recieve slow scrolling? lack of RAM?
It's a dual core 2ghz / 2Gb Ram laptop running Windows 7. Its fine except when you zoom out.
1:25,000 maps are supposed to be available this week too.
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1:25,000 map tiles are now available for The Mournes, Glens, Lough Erne and Sperrins @ £14.99 each.