GPS and Maps for West Africa

[kdgreene]

I'm looking for recommendations on the best gps and mapping software available for West Africa from Morocco to Benin. I need to update my gps and want to have a system that I can continue to use when I reach Europe. I've seen T4A and GPS vector map for Morocco. Any recommendations for Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Togo, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso? Thanks all.

Don Greene
ADVENTURE LEARNING FOUNDATION = online learning expeditions
Americas Overland - The Driving Handbook

[Frank Warner]

Not much beyond the wanderlust/world map stuff for those ....

[backofbeyond]

Depends what you are using as hardware and how much effort you want to put in.

There are plenty of maps available - Russian military maps for all of W.A. are freely available as are IGN 1: 200k (for Mauri and Senegal at least).

Links to where you can get these are on other posts on this site (sorry, can't find the links at the moment) and iirc are calibrated for Ozi Explorer.
A pda (I'm using a Mio p550) running OziEx will give you "you are here" sat nav. How accurate it is is a different matter but for the areas I've used it in its been between spot on and a mile or two out (depending on how accurate the original mapping was I suppose)

The same pda also runs TomTom Euro satnav with a change of sd card. Ok it's not as neat as a Rider2 or a Zumo but it is one box fits all in my car and on the bike.

[Frank Warner]

Most GPSes only take vector maps... (T4Africa, Morrotopo etc)

The maps backofbeyond is taking of are raster based maps .. they won't go on most GPSes.

[backofbeyond]

Originally Posted by Frank Warner

Most GPSes only take vector maps... (T4Africa, Morrotopo etc)

The maps backofbeyond is taking of are raster based maps .. they won't go on most GPSes.

Perfectly true, but when I was looking at this a year or so ago I couldn't find any vector based maps of west africa that were of much use and there seemed little point in buying a gps that would only give me something marginally better than lat/lon. I've got an old GPS2+ Garmin that still does that perfectly well.
Having seen how many raster based maps were available though made me look at hardware that would use them and at the moment I'm about 80% happy with it (the other 20% is because there are about 100 individual maps covering West Africa and at the moment I have to manually switch from one to the next).

It's not an approach I'd suggest others follow unless you like to be hands on with this type of thing. If there had been an open the box and plug it in solution that's what I'd have gone with last year.

[Frank Warner]

Originally Posted by backofbeyond

there are about 100 individual maps covering West Africa and at the moment I have to manually switch from one to the next

I use OziexlorerCE on a PDA iPAC (2900?) ... that has a few 100s of raster maps (mainly Australia) .. linked to the GPS so the raster map is centred on my reported GPS location .. automatically switches over to the next map ... The problem with this set up is the PDA screen washes out in bright sunlight.