Product Description

OS Landranger 1:50,000 maps available for the whole of Britain. Use these detailed OS maps t plan walks, mountain bike trails, print your own maps and program routes and waypoints into a GPS. Not only that but you can also review your performance and actual route taken by importing a GPS tracklog back into your PC and overlaying it on a map of your choice.Plan Routes:Now you can use real colour maps on a PC or Pocket PC to help you find your way. Choose from a wide range of maps for Land, Sea, City and Air. Memory-MapTM is available with a range of inclusive Ordnance Survey® maps or a European Road Map. Route Planning:- Click on the map to add routes and waypoints or draw a track freehand using the AutoTrackTM tool. See leg distance, compass bearing and total journey length. Digital TerrainTM:- Check the overall ascent and descent of your route with this interactive hill profile.Save and share routes:- Save waypoints, routes and tracks for future use, send them via email, or even put them on your web page great for planning a group trip! 3D WorldTM:- Visualise the terrain around your routes and tracks in a continuous 3D landscape! See the shape of the horizon, change the lighting to envisage the hills during different times of the day or create Fly-through movies of your routes and tracks and save them for future use. Print MapsZoom in and print your own custom full colour route maps. Print to scale:- Print maps at the scale of your choice. Multi-page maps:- Customise your printing with the new automatic paging for longer routes. TextNotesTM:- Add detailed text to your maps useful for creating route finding notes, recording details of hazards or highlighting areas of interest. Route card:- Print your route card detailing waypoints, compass bearings, distances and grid coordinates and include notes & photos. Relief Shading:- Print maps showing 3D terrain on an accurate 2D scale map. Just a glance at the map

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1567 in Software
• Brand: Memory-Map
• Published on: 2005-10-03
• Released on: 2005-10-21
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows XP

Synopsis
Presenting digital OS Landranger 1:50,000 maps, and a 1:250,000 road map, this book also includes an index to over 2500 walking routes and a Memory-Map V5.

Customer Reviews

Software could be better but ultimately this product is about seemless mapping across the UK
I agree with the reviewer but felt the need to clarify some points made. I agree that the the software is old and frankly the useability could be much better (I use Google for aerial photography). However, with some playing around you can get it to do what you need. For example.

1) You can output route cards to Excel as well as HTML (or a Duke of Edinburgh specific HTML format). This isn't explained in the manual but can be selected from the "Templates" when exporting a route card.
2) You can get the route card to only show named waypoints so reducing the number of points on your route card so it fits on one page. However, you need to make sure when you name a waypoint you tick "Show" as otherwise this feature won't work - again something not docuemented.

Frankly I think the software is a generation or two out of date but there is no other way I know of to get such flexible mapping of the UK. I live on the border of several OS maps. With Memory Map I have a seemless map of my area and I can print out an A4 sheet of any area I am going mountain biking in, laminate it on my home laminator (which was very cheap and a better solution than expensive paper) and stick it in any pocket (not just a map specific pocket). In response to the previous viewer if you choose an A4 template for printing rather than just drawing a rectangle you always get the map you want.

This printing functionality for me alone makes the cost worthwhile as I trash most of my maps stuffing them into pockets and then getting them damp (or wet when trying to change the map within a map case). With this, I just have to print another.

Unrefined - not impressed
I bought Memory-Map V5 and am less than impressed. I would not buy it again.

It has all the basic functions that you need for plotting routes and tracks and uploading and downloading to a GPS etc, There is a 3D fly through function but no aerial photography for some regions. I have found it easier to export the route to Google earth and fly over it there.

The windows layout is very non standard and hence confusing - and many functions are difficult to find - nothing so simple as a File menu for example.

The route card that it creates to provide information on your route is dissapointing, it does provide compass bearings, distances and times etc but it does not have cumulative mileage or cumulative time - essential when walking if you want to know if you are on time at a particular point. It is in web page format and has far too many pages- not very useful on a walk, there is no way to customise it and unfortunately it is formatted in such a way that importing it to a spreadsheet is painful.

Waypoint labels on a printed map are useful if you plan to walk a preplanned route using a GPS, Memory-Map doesn't seem to allow changes to font size for the labels so maps printed at small scale have labels that are difficult to read. At large scale, labels overlap, with the same effect.

If you accidentally delete anything there is no undo function.

There is a facility for adding notes to a map, it appears to be limited to 250 characters. After that it doesn't just stop allowing character entry, it all goes horribly wrong by adding new text at the beginning, ruining what has been already entered.

For printing maps out, there is a function for selecting the map rectangular area to be printed but no simple way that I have discovered for selecting a shape with sides proportional to A4 except by guesswork. Printed maps thus often have large areas of white space on them as a result.

You Need to Learn How to Use It!
Whilst largely agreeing with some of what the other reviewers have said, I must take issue with one or two points.

Firstly, the statement that the routecards are not configurable is simply not true. They are created according to templates which can be altered freely both with the regard to the values they contain (which are individually described in the included help index under 'routecards'!) and even the underlying html code (colour/font/tablecell sizes/included images etc). Cumulative time and distance can easily be added, for instance.

These changes can then be saved in user-defined templates. What the previous comment 'nothing so simple as a file system' means, I have no idea, as the name/path to each file the system creates is clearly chosen/shown in each dialogue box.

When exporting to excel, it is excel's import system that is the problem, not memorymap's format (html is, er, rather popular), but even this is alterable within the excel import wizard settings.

Yes, some of aerial photography is a little out of date, but since its possible to export a memory map route straight into Google Earth, so what? And if all you want is maps, then for the price of a dozen paper versions you get just about every version of every available OS map covering the whole of Britain. I mean you do actually want to visit these places right, not just fly through them on a screen?

With regard to the annotations, its unreasonable to want to enter more than 250 words in a note every 50m and then complain that they overlap on a 17 inch screen. If you really want to add that much information, just use the 'attach file' function to join a text file to the waypoint, and choose to add it as an appendix on the route card. Printing to A4 is very easy, you simply select A4 when you print :>)

Yes there are flaws here, but if you want to never buy a paper map again and you're prepared to spend some time learning how it works (rather than claiming things are impossible because you haven't found the way), Memory Maps is worth every penny. And the help files are actually very clear.