Santa Matt's ramblings

Earlier this week, Mrs. Santa and I decided to have a day to ourselves. So we set up plans and started Saturday morning with the glorious task of mowing the lawn. Once that was done we hopped into our mini-van and headed for Frankenmuth Michigan. We had planned a day of geocaching, shopping and a nice dinner. For those that may not know, geocaching is using a GPS receiver to locate caches. They may be an actual cache like an old ammo can containing a logbook and trinkets or a virtual cache where you go and observe something and then log it on line. I have a Tom tom bluetooth GPS. This is a receiver only and talks to my Nokia internet tablet. I use Maemo Mapper to display maps controlled by the Tom tom. We used this to get close, to navigate the roads. I also have a Garmin ForeTrex 101 which we would use walking to actually locate the cache. We drove into Frankenmuth from the south end. We stopped at Bronner's for our first cache. Now Mrs. Claus and I had been talking about geocachi...

I use an Apple Newton. I have for years. And although I am slowly moving from the Newton to a Nokia Internet Tablet, there are still times I use my Newton and still some things it does better than anything else I have found. But that is a topic for another posting. In this posting I want to explain how I make maps for use with my Garmin Fortrex 101 GPS and GPSMap Lite for the Newton. Also, this tutorial will be for making maps on a PC. Apologies to my Mac friends but I have just never made a map on my Mac. The first decision is to decide are we making a road map or a wilderness-hiking map. Both follow the same basic principles but there is a difference in the map source. For Road maps I use maps captured from MS MapPoint. I have also used Google mapping. For hiking maps I generally use satellite photos from Google Earth. I did download a special mapping version of AdobeReader and you can get pdf versions of most US topographical maps from the US geological survey web site. But I found ...