You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Does anyone use this?
Annual subscription of £19.99 so you can plot and print routes of the U.K. Considering the cost of an Explorer map is around £8, this does sound quite good value.
Would be very interested to hear any experiences.
Thanks. 🙂
From using the free trail a while back I recall being a bit disappointed.
I found the plotting tools a bit clunky (may well be improved now, I don't know!) and although the idea of printing your own maps is good, in practise I found even using a high quality printer at work the end products were way below the resolution of a "real" map - would regard the maps (when printed on normal paper) to really only be a single use product 🙁
Also worth remembering that an A4 sheet doesn't actually give you that much map and shuffling sheets of paper on the trail gets a bit of a faff and once you factor in printing costs and durability I decided that OS maps were actually pretty good value and I do love the whole thing of spreading out a map and browsing routes.
Compared with the "traditional" mapping programs like Anquet and Memory Map, it's an OK deal. Anquet do the whole of the UK on a DVD at 1:50k for less than £100 with unlimited printing. The route handling/management tools are better. However, maps do occasionally go out of date and you're then going to want to update them - that could be another £50 or so every 4/5 years depending on how up-to-date you want to be (if at all). Anquet also have some other nice features (like historic maps).
Thanks for the replies chaps! A few questions for you:
hilldodger - bit confused about your printing comment ie surely the quality wouldn't be any different to, say, Tracklogs or Memory Map? I agree with spreading out maps though, such fun.
I use Tracklogs and have England, Scotland and Wales on 1:50K scale. Tend to print out to shove in my pocket for easy reference but still carry the proper map. But, I would love 1:25K scale software and it's obviously a huge expense hence this gizmo would be good value.
One thing I'm not sure about though is how often the maps are updated, seeing as its OS. They obviously wouldn't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
With regard to updating, it can be done with Tracklogs but will cost, not sure how much though.
hilldodger - bit confused about your printing comment ie surely the quality wouldn't be any different to, say, Tracklogs or Memory Map
I've never printed out maps before 😳
I use either Viewranger on my phone or paper OS maps so can't compare to other products.....
One of the reasons I went from Memory map to Getamap was the cost of having up to date mapping.
I was having problems with MM at the time and needed mapping quick so I bit the bullet and went with the 19.99, no plans on going back now.
I thought at first the free service would be useful as you can create routes and load them directly onto a Garmin GPS, but my garmin is limited to 250 route points for each route so not so good. Can't see an option to create a track which would be more useful.
flatfish - any idea how often they update or is it the same as Landranger/Explorer ones?
I use Quo it's free and the maps are cheap often you see them on offer too. The updates aren't massively essential in many areas as usually little changes.
As and when they update their own mapping, so i'm guessing weekly.
I could be wrong though.
It may be in their T&C's though.