National Geographic Back Roads Explorer

A free stack of road maps used to be a common sight in the office of every service station when I was a lad. I found maps of the city I was in, nearby states, and the whole of the United States. The price of gas was also much cheaper back then! Back then, that was the way things were. I thought this package was nothing more than overview state maps showing major highways, when I saw the price. But I was wrong. It's a product that almost makes the empty feeling left by the demise of free gas station maps and services with a smile. That was a delightful error on my part! I can easily zoom out to a country overview or zoom in to the street level of any street within the country using these maps. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Hawaii and Alaska are among the states. It's a beautiful and complete set of maps that I highly recommend if you have a laptop in your RV or use a computer at home as an armchair traveler. Would National Geographic obviate that part of their service by simply cleaning the windshield and checking the oil?.

Liberty Washington

| Dec 17, 2020

In order to plot road bike routes using this program and generate elevation profiles along those routes, I purchased it. Using a mouse to trace the route on the map is a good method for entering a route into Back Roads Explorer. It's easy to create profiles and a link is included to the map from each profile You can put a marker on the map route by clicking on the profile, which will tell you where you can expect to climb that big hill. After exporting the map, elevation profiles and graphics files, they can be printed or stored on a PDA or in an image file (JPG, GIF, etc. ). Be aware that it is not possible to generate directions automatically Having a three-month minimum on your credit card was one of the reasons The only reason I am not giving it a 5-star rating is because the CD media was incompatible with my CD drive. I had to try several times Data would then have to be loaded from map CDs, which would take a very long time. There were times when the program would freeze and need The system would freeze 100% of the time if CDs had to be switched in my route. In order to resolve this, I had to copy National Geographic CDs on my computer's hard drive (which took several attempts because of CD read errors), and then burn it on a CDR. Also, the GPS route import is very basic, so the software is only awarded three stars. I haven't tried it but it may work better when connected to the computer directly (I haven't tried it), but only text file formats are supported by the There is no guaranteed way to import text files directly into the Back Roads Explorer due to their arbitrary format. It does not import the text file generated by Garmin eTrex directly in my case.

Kaison Hebert

| Nov 14, 2020

There is some information not available through Google Maps, but because it is on CDs, some of it is out of date and updating it may not be possible. A bit of time is required to get used to using the different magnifications and printing grids. Magnification at its highest level causes the display to be blurry. A GPS location does not appear to be fully consistent with a Google map or on-site Magellan GPS reading.

Reign Stevenson

| Aug 05, 2021

Using this program was easy enough for me. My GPS wasn't compatible, so it was a drawback. Having recently purchased a new laptop that lacks a serial port for the GPS, I was disappointed. It was the software I used to map where the rally race would take place and where there were the best viewing spots. I wish I could have gotten a 3D flyby graphic, it would have been fun. Although it would not be highly accurate to describe the elevation change in that manner, it may have been helpful to visualize.

Isla Moyer

| Apr 29, 2021

You made some good.

Azariah Mooney

| Dec 19, 2020

In this product you can view scans of a The difference between 500,000 and 1 is One USGS map of each of the 48 contiguous states, and one map of each state containing Two hundred and fifty thousand for Alaska and Hawaii on seventeen An example of the user interface is found in the National Geographic state series for hikers. it would be fine to plan hiking trips on State Series 1, the following is probably not the best advice While the program offers some tools that would prove useful to a back-end analyst, it offers little in the way of useful tools of any kind You can explore roads with this app.
In my opinion, the main advantage this program offers is that it offers reasonably detailed topographic maps of all 50 states for a very fair price. While this is not without its quirks, it does make these maps fairly easy to navigate. Alaska and Hawaii can only be accessed by clicking the "Information and Help" toolbar button, selecting "Start with a new map", pressing "GO", and clicking on the state of your choice. You will be prompted to load the CD after you click the state. I am sure that most people won't have any problems with the 17 CDs. When you install the software, each CD will contain two or more states, so once you get to the state you desire, you will only have to deal with one CD. It would be more convenient to copy some or all of them to your hard drive, provided you still have about 8G of space left. You can configure where the program should be installed and where to look for maps with the program. As well as basic maps, I wanted it to be a route planner for "exploring the back roads" and this is where it fails. The process can be done but you must do it by hand and the method of input makes it tedious at best. Once you have done all that work, the final result is not exactly It seems that the routing tool does not seem to be associated with the roadway overlay in any way. This means it cannot give you a list of route instructions. The data on the roads is very basic even though there are lots of roads shown. It was a disappointing experience Whenever you would like to have a map and want to retain it for a long time, here are some options for you It is impressive that you get 100,000 USGS topo maps covering all 50 states for such a modest price. To poke around on the maps and see what may be nearby is fun. Using the NG State series will allow you to purchase the appropriate state if you are a hiker. For hikers, the maps here are somewhat of a nuisance as they are too small to be much use except for If you wish to explore backroads, I think you are better off with a readily available map book like DeLorme or Benchmark, assuming it is available in There is another route planning software that you should use if you want to use back roads.

Mara Johns

| May 25, 2021