Review of Garmin eTrail CD-ROM
Pull a bunch of data off Ordnance Survey maps, put it in a flashy macromedia production of TRAILS Magazine's top 200 best UK walking routes, tack on some code from Wherefromhere Ltd, and you've got Garmin's eTrail CD.
I admit I was a little more than curious when the leading manufacture of recreational GPS hardware put its name on a CD of trail data. So I put down nearly a "C"-note to get a firsthand look at what the big "G" thinks a compact disk version Travel by GPS should look like. Fancy graphics aside, read on to find out just how good the data really is.
First Impressions on a Quick Tour
The program installs nicely from the CD, eventually coming up the Route Map in the main window. The Route Map is a clickable overview of all the United Kingdom (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales). Hovering the mouse over a particular region, a brief description or the region is displayed. Click on a region and you will zoom-in on the Regional Map, which shows clickable icons for each route. There are different colored and shaped icons for the different levels of difficulty: easy, moderate, and hard.
At first it was not clear to me how to zoom-out from the Regional Map. I soon learned that you had to click on the "Find a Route" button to go to previous level of detail.
When you click on a Route Icon displayed on the Regional Map, the Route Summary Page is displayed. The Route Summary gives Trail Magazine style descriptions and photographs, which are really quite inviting.
I found using the clickable maps to find walking routes very intuitive. Alternatively, you can use a search form to display routes by Region, Grid Reference, and RouteID.
Other screens available from the summary page include: ROUTE, ROUTE MAP, SAVE TO GPS, and PRINT. ROUTE gives a sequential description of the route along with an elevation profile chart. The ROUTE MAP is more of an illustration than a map. It is "not intended for use" on the trail. It pops up in a window that gets in the way and must be closed to see the main screen. Clicking SAVE TO GPS a utility that transfers the data to your GPS. I liked the way this utility provided confirmation of how many routes and waypoints would be loaded. The utility "knew" how many route points my GPS could handle and it split up the route accordingly. I also liked the way it did not lock-up my comm port so that I could have other programs "talking" to my GPS at the same time I was running the eTrails CD.
Show me the Data!
I downloaded a couple of trails to my GPS to see what was actually transferred. All the waypoints are encoded with a 3-digit prefix that is the RouteID. So it was easy to figure out what waypoints when with what trail, but since there were no references to the waypoint numbers in the trail descriptions it was very difficult to correlate the waypoint data with the step-by-step descriptions. Especially since the waypoint data does not make use of symbols, comments, or elevations.
How good is it?
I wanted to determine how accurate the data was, but being in South Carolina, I couldn't really walk out the door to test it. So I emailed Phil Newby (Phil's GPS Resource Pages) and asked him what he thought.
We focused on the Fairfield & Snowdon Horseshoes as these are two very popular moderate to strenuous walks which Phil had track data for. Here's the summary statement from Phil:
"... their information appears to be taken directly off the 1:50000 map as it religiously follows the map paths, rather than the ground paths"
According to Phil, the accuracy is as good as can be expected for pulling data from a map - it should get you within a few tens of meters of the trail. Better data is available on the Internet. Check out Phil's web site for track data on Fairfield Horseshoe, Snowdon Horseshoe, and around 80 others.
Help!
Customer support for the eTrail CD is hard to find. There were a couple of references to Emap UK - a large magazine, radio and television company. However, their URL (www.emapmagazines.co.uk) is a subscription ordering website.
Where to Get It
Garmin eTrails is only available in the UK. I got my copy from GPS Warehouse. The the cost of product ( at prevailing exchange rate) and shipping to the US cost me $89.28 (!).
