National Geographic TOPO!
National Geographic has teamed up with the United States Geological Survey system to bring some great map products in the form of software, I get to peruse my home state of Minnesota and find all the features of this great product.
Ease of Use, Performance: 24/25, Look & Feel: 25/25,
Features 22/25, How much I enjoy 23/25
Total: 94/100
Ease of use, simple to install on a PC and works great through your GPS unit and even works with older ones, you can’t get much better than this. The National Geographic TOPO! Software suites are a great topographic map set that uses a great interface program to load and store topographic maps as well as trails and popular destinations on these maps.
The actual TOPO! base program is free and you can download it now from the National Geographic website but the state maps and other special maps and features will cost you. Each state set costs about $100 but it contains valuable topographic maps of those states currently updated and taken directly from the US Geological Service’s topographic maps as well as National Geographic’s own.
The USGS topographic maps include not only marked and known towns, cities, roads and other man made features but very helpful information like elevations, terrain features and everything else on those highly detailed topographic maps. The maps include very useful information for campers like campgrounds, national parks and trails. Hikers will like the trails and many free additions like Historic trails across the United States and terrain features.
Boaters and fishermen will enjoy the detail lake maps and even the available features like piers and large submerged structures as well as channels and swamps. The geocacher and hiker will like many features like elevation and viewing the maps in 3D so you can tell just what the elevation will actually be like on those steeper hills and rugged terrain.
There are a host of great features like drawing routes using your mouse directly on the maps and being able to save them individually. You can add points of interest and map out a route to several and save the entire map as one travel plan. You can even use different colors for each route for alternate ways to get where you want to go or use them to categorize the plan you want to create.
The topographic map includes five levels of detail with the first being about a quarter of the United States and the fifth being a close in detail that shows about a five mile by 3 mile square on my monitor screen. I have a 21 inch widescreen monitor and using a different sized monitor would give you a different sized screen so your map would of course be smaller or larger according to the screen resolution your computer system has.