I’m thinking about getting Delorme’s Topo USA to help plot out cycling and hiking routes. The reviews on Amazon are not that positive, but sometimes only the very picky people bother to post a review. The forum archive has some older posts about the Delorme software that’s bundled with Computrainer which makes me think that the data they use has a considerable amount of inconsistencies or innaccuracies.
Does anyone use Topo USA for on-road or off-road route planning? Would you recommend it?
Thanks,
Lee
P.S. If you’re responding but you don’t use version 4.0, please tell us which version you’re using.
off-road… haven’t used it for that purpose. But, could easily see how it would be much more useful for off-road than on-road. The topo data is based on actual contours of the land. Roads are commonly not equal to the contours. That is why using it with the Computrainer commonly requires adjusting the elevations (i.e., leveling).
FWIW Joe Moya
BTW, I have used it for backpacking - it is very good for that purpose.
I’ve installed and “ridden” Computrainer courses that were made on it. All I can say is that the hill profiles seem to bear little resemblence to reality. The ups and downs are too abrupt. The IMUSA bike circuit in real life has very moderate (under 6%; mostly 2-4%) grades, with gentle transitions. The software had most of the climbs with 20+% sections all over the place. Same experience with the Cal Half course and a couple of others.
It makes the whole thing worthless for training on a Computrainer.
Julian… Some of the course I first built using the Topo software were very very off. But after practicing and learning how to properly create and import the courses they can be very realistic. Try soome of the newer courses off my site, they should be more to your liking. www.michiganoutlaws.com
Julian… Some of the course I first built using the Topo software were very very off. But after practicing and learning how to properly create and import the courses they can be very realistic. Try soome of the newer courses off my site, they should be more to your liking. www.michiganoutlaws.com
The software works great. You will like it…
Thanks Ken! I will try that. You are to be complimented for your hard work in sharing what you’ve figured out with the community.
thanks for compliment Julian. If you need anyting else let me know. Even if you think the new courses I built suck, let me know, I want these things to be accurate.
It has the most problems on road dealing with hills and especially switchback climbs which require considerable smoothing to even things out since roadbuilders make the most deviations from the contour in those cases. The smoothing feature in the course creator software alters the finishing altitide the more it smooths so I generally import the CSV file from Topo USA into excel to smooth the data my own way (generally centered moving average). The end result won’t be exactly accurate but will end up being quite close in difficulty and the sequence of events.
Some of the road maps are out of date but they can be edited to correct them.
Off road it’s very good unless there have been acts of nature since the area was surveyed (I haven’t looked at Mt. St. Helens to see if it’s before or after).
There was a post earlier talking about the Lake Placid course. The poster had used the software and concluded that the steepest part of the course was about an 18% grade.
This got me curious, so when I was up there last week, I took my angle measuring thingie (a technical term explained in the glossary). I went to a few places on the course and measured the angle as best I could with the tool and these old eyes.
The steepest part of the course I found was the last little rise just before you go past the school and take a left back into town. It measured about 6.5 degrees, which corresponds to about an 11% grade. The rest of the steepest sections were between five and six degrees or a nine to ten per cent grade.
By the way, will you be bringing that 700c disc wheel you owe me to Lake Placid this year? I think I have been patient and would like to give it a whirl. I am sure you can help me figure out how to put it on my 650c bike.