I just got a new GPS mapping program for my Garmin and thought I'd share my comments. The mapping software is from vvmapping.com. I've loaded it and this it what I've found so far:

All land with a green background is public land. I quickly looked up my families 80 acres near Comins, MI that's surrounded by state land, and sure enough the 80 acres shows up as private. Nice!

I checked the trail accurany down in Southwestern Lower Michigan by where I live and the trails seem to be in the right locations. I did find two sections shown that weren't even trail sections, but mapping errors by the DNR.

THE TRAILS ARE NUMBERED!!!! Yes, when glancing at your gps you will see a trail number, just like if you were driving your car on a highway. This is a very nice feature.

The base map under the trail has tons of info. It looks like all roads show up, even 2 tracks. The snowmobile trails show up as black when viewed in Mapsource, but they are red when viewed on my GPS unit (etrex Legend Cx). Where a trail goes down a road or 2 track, the road/2 track shows up on top of the trail so you know your on a road.

For $45 this is the best software I've seen out there. I like being able to share free tracks at gpsmaps.com too. But I have not seen anything out there that has ALL of Michigan snowmobile trail maps.

I give it 4.9 out of 5 stars. This looks like the best gps software for off trail riding too. The green background will give me some assurance that I'm not trespassing when going down that untracked 2 track.

Tony

This looks like something I am interested in. When this is loaded into the GPS do you simply change from city navigator to trail maps like you would from city navigator to topo?

Yep. If you have a big enough sd card you can load the entire trailmap set plus city nav mapsets in the area you're going to be in. Then just hide city nav or topo and this map will show.

LOOK LIKE A GO PROGRAM

Think I'm going to have to pick this up....

have mine on order should have it by the end of the week. thanks for posting it

I receieved mine last week, this program is the shit. Exactly what I was looking for. I bought the combo atv/snowmobile trails with the microsd card so just pop that thing in and im good to go.

just got it today looks to be well worth the money. i did check some of my tracks from last year to see how close the map was and it was right on. sweet program

just wanted to know if it will work on a garmin etex lengend c?????????

Looks like a great program. Where is everybody buying this?

As long as you can upload maps to your Garmin it will work. You can select which counties you're riding in and load them. Each county is only about 560KB in size. The Legend C holds 24MB of maps, so you should be able to load about 40 counties at a time.




I think the only place you can get it is at vvmapping.com.

vvmapping.com

Tony

(disclaimer - I am VVMapping)

Works great in a Legend C (like Tony said). My mother inlaw has one, for example, and we can fit the eastern UP and the northern lower peninsula into it.

The entire UP is about 16MB. Northern LP (US-10 north) is about 14MB. Entire State is closer to 70MB.

Anybody have this program AND Mapsource US Topo installed on your Garmin? I assume one will not transparently overlay the other, and you have to select which of the two maps you'd want to view if you have installed both. How easy is it to toggle back and forth?

And for loading...I assum I will need to select all my Topo 2008 maps AND the vvmapping maps at the sametime within my Mapsource software to get them to all transfer from computer to GPS at once? Or does this vvmapping software only function seperately, outside of Mapsource?

I'm mostly asking I guess for an Etrex Legend CX since that's what I have...if you have something similar. I'm not sure how user-friendly that toggle is...especially if I have my 2GB card with about 40% of the country in high detail US Topo loaded already...in Topo 2008 that's a WHOLE lot of segments and check boxes to sort out and manage in the map-list view. Not something I want to mess with trailside.

And speaking of segments, roughly how many segments is this program split into? One segment per county? 10 segments per county? 10 segments for the whole state? Just a ballpark is good enough. Mostly want to know roughly how many individual pieces that 70 meg state map is split into.

Thanks! Looks like a really cool program, but if it will be a headache to use in conjunction with my Topo 2008 software, not sure I need or want it.

2trakR...if I interpret your disclaimer correctly, this is actually your program? Hope so! I can't think of anyone better than you to answer my questions above if I'm making any sense...I kinda-sorta know what I'm talking about, I think, but still definitely learning how to use all the capabilities of these things.

Keep an eye on this forum...there should be transparent trail maps for MI available soon from several sources. These will overlay your Topo 2008 or any other Garmin detailed maps.

This map will not display concurrently with another map installed/active for the same coverage area. This is a full detail map, roads and more are already in there. There is generally more detail than the Topo maps, although no elevation profiles. Part of what makes our maps unique is the visual difference between certified county roads and regular two tracks/forest roads in addition to detailed public land coverage for the entire State.



My recommendation is to use just our maps for coverage of Michigan unless you need auto-routing support (our maps do not support auto-routing, as in have the GPS generate a route within the GPS itself).

It's not too hard to switch between map sets on the GPS. The Nuvi/Zumo make it pretty easy with check box (setup -> Map -> Map Info, uncheck the box next to the preferred map program, I believe).
eTrex C, which is darn close to the same setup as my 60C/CX allows you to enable/disable map families. At the map screen hit Menu, navigate to the map info list (has the check boxes by all of the installed map tiles) then hit Menu again. That brings up a list of installed map families that you can show/hide. This makes it about 4 clicks to show/hide Topo and the VVMapping (or other) maps. Not too bad...



Correct. Our installer integrates the maps with MapSource, similar to OEM Garmin maps.


We also include a licensed copy of SendMap so you can load the maps directly to the GPS without using MapSource. Instructions are included.


84 (one per county, except for Wayne County which is split in two due to size).



Yes, my stuff. I ride street legal dirt bikes in the warm season & needed to know what was legal and what wasn't to ride. Started building maps for my own use years ago putting the pieces together that allowed me to glance at the GPS and be 99% certain that the road I was on was legal or not. It's pretty tricky to know at times when you are way out in the boonies. Same for sledding, although we mainly ride designated trails.

Cool! Thanks for the detailed reply. Answers pretty much all my questions. One left...

Does your map show forest road numbers?

Thanks again.

Some of the USFS forest roads, but definitely not a ton of them. Hoping to get them in this winter; have been waiting for the Feds to finish their Travel Management Plans (UP is mostly done, LP is not) so I can include info on which of their roads are open to ORV/Sleds.

Just a follow up on this software. Went to the UP and it was extremely nice to see ahead of time where I was going on the gps. I still wish I had never waisted my money on topo. This program has everything I need for sledding. While up there we did some off trail riding on the marked forest roads in the program. That was cool! 3 feet of untracked snow is hard to come by on the trail.

Tony