GPS for International Travel / Pan-American

[rockandroll]

I will be driving my 2003 Toyota Tundra down the Pan-American Highway in 5 months and have turned my attention to navigation options. Other than the classic map and compass what are the best navigation options for international travel? Surely they're making GPS units that can handle the maps of Central and South America.

Has any body mounted a laptop and used that in lieu of a GPS?

 

[dzzz]

Garmin's the big dog. Start there.

Plenty of threads about laptops, netbooks, and carputers.

 

[rockandroll]

MapSource WorldMap

Garmin's the big dog. Start there.

Looks like Garmin's answer to Central and South America is MapSource WorldMap. A forum search for this yields only 1 result from 2006. Does anybody have any experience with it? Amazon reviews aren't favorable.

From the Carputer navigation front, MS Streets and Trips 2010 only covers North America and Google Earth doesn't appear to be built with navigation in mind.

 

[esh]

Spoke with Sandcruiser at the Petaluma TLCA swap meet a couple days ago. He said they mostly operated off the built-in basemap. Not sure if it was the Garmin MapSource'd map or not. Likely a SA regional base map.

As a relative comparison, my 60csx's basemap is really really good. I can find every gravel/dirt road on it (and ex-roads many times) when I'm in back country.

 

[Trail Monkey]

To my knowledge you will not find detailed base maps of CA on GPS. there are a few independents that are selling routes usable on the garmin units. but they are not very detailed and not great.. you best bet is a garmin with world base maps and an iphone with google maps satellite view..

 

[Sirocco]

Garmin Mapsource is good.

Garmin worldmap is... Basic. Better than a basemap (obviously), but only main roads and few minor roads are shown. The good news is Garmin do many many maps for individual countries which provide far more detail. Dont get these 2 confused by the way, Mapsource (MS) is the operating platform if you like, like fugawi, oziexplorer etc. Worldmap is just the overlay that runs in MS (appologies if this is teaching people to suck eggs).

The other good news is that there are many many maps from free sources/3rd parties that run on the garmin platform

people like Tracks for Africa T4A are just one example and offer some of the best routes throughout the African continent. Many more exist, its just a matter of searching.

As a planning and base tool, I dont think you could beat MS running on a laptop. Add in some free mapping or Garmins individual countries with papermap backup and you should be more than sufficiently covered.

Its all about covering all bases :coffeedrink:

G

 

[rockandroll]

Very helpful info Esh, Trail Monkey & Sirocco.

Thanks to your help I'm leaning toward a simpler and new Garmin Nuvi unit in the 7x5 series and using the worldmap add-on. I've seen prices as low as $150 on eBay for the unit, much cheaper than I was expecting to spend :sombrero: