National Geographic Back Roads Explorer

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Software Great Price
Comment: This is great software. Ive used it my car with laptop and GPS on a variety of road trips MN, TX, LA, UT, MO, AR and gotten myself into and out of many situations without a hitch, except for being towed out of a bayou in Louisiana twice but that was my bad not the softwares. This software will allow you to get to places that others wouldnt be able to find.

Ive also used this software to map the entire Salt Lake City Utah region from Ogden all the way to Payson for a telecom company that was using the info for a Wi-Fi positioing service and this NG product was dead on. This job required driving every residential and commercial street in the the Utah metropolitan area and it was flawless, and only off where new developments were being constructed. The onle thing I would add is to install the maps for the region youll be visitng instead of swapping cds in and out so the transition will blend seamlessly.

For $49 its tough to beat.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Gone are the days of free gas station maps
Comment: When I was a lad, I used to walk into the office of any service station and grab a stack of free road maps. There were maps of the city I was in, nearby states, and even the USA. Gas was allot cheaper in those days too! Those were the days..... Now here's a product that almost fills the empty feeling left by the demise of free gas station maps and service with a smile. When I saw the price of this package I thought, "Well, can't be much more than overview state maps showing major highways." I was delightfully wrong! With these maps I can zoom out to an overview or zoom in to the city street level of any street in the country. The fact that the states include Hawaii and Alaska was a pleasant surprize as well. If you have a laptop in your Rv or are an armchair traveler at home with a computer, I highly recommend this beautiful and complete set of maps. Now if National Geographic would oly offer to clean the windshield and check the oil!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of Bugs! Topic Entertain publishes this CD
Comment: The company Topic does a lousy job at customer service. As for the developer, maybe some third rate company. The scans of the maps are not high enough for area blow ups. Everything is fuzzy at best. The interface is clumsy ... sluggish ... backwards! This is the 21st Cen! If you have a Garmin, stick with their apps for now. Or just buy an old fashion topo map.
*Avoid this product!!!!

Customer Rating:
Summary: Works much better than the alternatives
Comment: I've used versions of topo mapping software from Topo!, Garmin, DeLorme and National Geographic.

I use maps for hiking and the quality in the 17-CD set is very good. Garmin MapSource has the same territory in 3-CDs and the detail in much more minimal.

Back Roads with version 4.2.3 of Topo! from Nat Geo's website is one of the better products out there. You can adjust the shading factor, get 3D view, and send co-ordinates to your GPS.

I did have to contact support to realize there was a new version, but they got back to me in 24 hours. I had a tech support question on Garmin MapSource and got no response from their tech support.

The only downside of Back Roads for me was that it can only upload waypoints and not maps to my Garmin GPS. Otherwise I would use it exclusively.

Back Roads allows you to enter your co-ordinates in UTM, unlike MapSource. The drawing and route tools are better. The elevation profile is another feature that is not there in MapSource.

I read the complaint about elevation lines not meeting up, but you get the same problem with paper USGS maps.

Back Roads also prints nice maps that you can slide into a plastic sheet for hiking. Nat Geo also makes a paper that prints sturdy topo maps.

You can get topos and aerial photos from the web. The USGS site [http://nationalmap.gov/gio/viewonline.html] has links to 7 map servers. Microsoft Terra Server is a free one that can be a good tool. The print capabilities of Back Roads/Topo! are still better though.

Back Roads/Topo! isn't perfect but it's the best tool of the 4 mapping softwares I've purchased. If it sent maps to my Garmin GPS I would give it a 5.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Major Problems with this software.
Comment: Wish I could give this one less than one star. Don't waste your money with this one. If the software actually worked, it reports to do many of the things that I was looking for.

First problem -- the software claims to be compatable with Magellan's Explorists series. Tech Support (at least that's what they call themselves), says it is not.

Second problem -- the software is apparently not XP compatable. I can load the software and basically get it to work but it locks up when I attempt to save a file or change to a different sub-directory. What good is a software that will not save your work??

Multiple emails to Tech Support resulted in multiple suggestions by Tech Support to "reload' the software. Gee!!! I have to call Tech Support for that suggestion??? Apparently they have nothing to offer beyond the suggestion of reloading the software (which doesn't help).

After multiple attempts to get this software to work and multiple emails to Tech Support, I'm writing this one off as a $50 reminder to never buy a National Geographic product again.