General Information

• The GlobalPositioning System (GPS) is the only fully functional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Utilizing a constellation of at least 24 Medium Earth Orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals, the system enables a GPS receiver to determine its location, speed, direction, and time.

  See Wikipedia for more information.

• There is a lot of information to be found by just searching for GPS Reviews
• gpsinformation.net
• I've found the GPS Tracklog weblog to be of interest.
• GPS Review

Commercial GPS

The main manufactures of GPS receivers are:

• Garmin
• TomTom
• Magellan
• Mio
• NAVIGON

Maps

The main providers of GPS maps for purchase are

• Garmin again. Their maps are readable only by their own units. Their software is called MapSource and comes with the maps. We have the City Navigator maps for North America (v7) and Europe(v8) .

  We thought about the "TOPO US 2008" ($116.65) product but the previous version (no year) used the USGS 1:100,000 topo maps. The latest version are constructed from the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) data instead of the digitized topo maps. The reviews on REIs web site are mixed.

• DeLorme
• Magellan

For TOPO Maps we have

Garmin Topo US 2008
• National Geographic TOPO
• DeLorme TOPO?
• Topo Map of California for Garmin GPS is a 1.03GB file for all of California. File name is GMAPSUPP.IMG and has already been downloaded to /home/ftp/pub/garmin/. It requires a 2GB microSD card.

DIY GPS Maps

Free maps can be downloaded from several web sites. These maps are not in a format that is directly usable by the GPS receivers so it requires additional software to convert these maps into a unable format.

• Microsoft provides the TerraServer maps.
• The USGS Seamless Server site.
• The US Census Bureau has the TIGER/Line data.
• OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create free editable maps. Wikipedia Displayable using the KDE tool Marble (installed as 'marble').

Software

• GPS Babel is a GPL'd program that converts GPS data from one format to another. It does support the Garmin MapSource (.mps) data format. It has a Wiki. It has a nice Wikipedia entry. It does not necessarily handle maps, but rather the waypoint and track information. GPSBabel is bundled inside Google Earth. It is installed on streak.
• The cGPSMapper software is multi-platform, including a Linux version. It also has sendMap20 for Linux to send and receive maps.
• Topo Fusion is a windows product with a Demo version available. It downloads and displays maps from publicly available information on the Internet. It also does Geocoding of photos. Recommended.
• USAPhoto Maps is a free windows program that displays the TerraServer aerial photos. This is the same database that the Magellan MapSend Topo 3-D Map uses.
• ExpertGPS is a windows program with a 30 day Demo version. It is listed as being compatible with the Garmin 60CSx which I take to mean it can upload and download maps directly to the unit via a USB cable.
• Leszek Pawlowicz of Free Geography Tools has written the windows program MOAGU (Mother Of All Garmin Utilities) which has a Demo mode or can be purchased for $20. It takes scanned maps and builds up lots of tiles that can be displayed on the Garmin 60CSx. It can also use downloaded maps from the USGS Seamless Server site. It requires the cGPSMapper program.
• Instructions for Creating Custom Topo Maps for a Garmin GPS use Demo2TOPO (requires IDL Virtual Machine from www.rsinc.com), GPSMapEdit from www.geopainting.com and cGPSMapper from www.cgpsmapper.com.
• GPSMapEdit from Geopainting.com is Windows shareware. It is designed for visual authoring of GPS-maps in various proprietary cartographic formats, including Garmin MapSource.
• DEM2TOPO is a program to generate vector contour levels from freely available digital elevation model (DEM) data. These contour vectors are ideally suited for upload to portable GPS units where commercial topographic maps are unavailable or inadequate. With a few simple steps and the appropriate software, topo maps can be uploaded to Garmin GPS units that support mapping (see the Using DEM2TOPO section, below). The program is designed for Canadian DEM files , but those for other countries using the ASCII version of the USGS DTED file format should work. GeoTIFF files are also supported, but currently only those written by 3DEM have been tested.

  DEM2TOPO is written in IDL, which is a high level interpreted language for scientific data analysis. Since it is an interpreted language, you must install the freely available IDL Virtual Machine to run the program.

• GDAL www.gdal.org can be used instead of DEM2TOPO to create contours (Unix friendly). GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. It is written in 'C' but has bindings to many script languages. The package Geo::CDAL on CPAN contains the Perl bindings.

  Also have OGR for vector data formats. OGR used to stand for OpenGIS Simple Features Reference Implementation. However, since OGR is not fully compliant with the OpenGIS Simple Feature specification and is not approved as a reference implementation of the spec the name was changed to OGR Simple Features Library.

GeoTagging

• Exiftool - View the exif data
• geko and rdf - A python tool to add geo tags
• jpegrdf - Convert Exif data to RDF