Russian maps and GPS - how accurate are they?
 

Russian maps of West Africa are quite widely available, either as web downloads or as commercial products.
With a bit of work they can be used with gps mapping software like OziExplorer.
Has anyone here actually used them for navigation with a laptop / pda and if so how accurate have you found them?

My experience here with 1:250k maps is .. they are fairly good when you consider the resolution of the paper map it self. Around 200 metres max 'error' but typically better than that.

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Point 1
Do remember you are dealing with a paper map maker who knew it was going onto paper .. so did not expect it to go on a GPS system .. so if they wanted to display 2 buildings at location Z .. but there was not room to display them at that scale .. they simply placed them at z-1 and z+1 .. so both are 'there' and you can see them .. even if they are not at the absolutely correct place.

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Point 2
These are 1984 or there abouts date wise .. some things do change .. even in Africa.

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Madmappers have the russian maps with the Oziexplorer files .. in ecw format so they go straight on a PDA .. they'll even sell you a CD with them on it to save downloading fees.

Thanks for the reply Frank. I've got a lot of the maps from the madmappers site that covers the area of my next UK - West Africa trip and they open up ok with Ozi Explorer on my pda. I've been running Ozi with commercially calibrated maps of the UK for some months now to get to know the programme and found that the maps and the "you are here" pointer differ considerably at times - up to several miles.

Obviously I can't check the Russian maps without going to Africa and I was just wondering whether anyone else had used them in a similar way and if so whether they had noticed how accurate the tracks are.

There was some info saying they were suprisingly accurate on the mappers site (for a South African map) but there's nothing like getting feedback from users

I do seem to have collected a fair number of paper maps
of the the area over the years and found an elderly lat/lon only gps pretty helpful on my last trip although I still managed to get lost more often than I would have liked.

I can appreciate that the Russian map makers never intended that their paper maps would be put to this use but if they are accurate enough to be helpful though that would be a great advance from the usual - drive a bit, stop bike, unpack map bag, look at map to try and discover where you actually are, give up, get lat/lon from gps, cross ref with map etc

Russian maps
 

Backof..

Read my experience with the Russian maps (and OziEx) when i was crossing Grand Erg du Bilma in Niger;

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...light=russians

cheers,

Noel
exploreafrica.web-log.nl

Thanks for that Noel. Sounds like they might be worth persevering with. The whole of west africa is only around 300mb so it's not that much data or trouble to take them and see how they work on the easy bits first.
The pda gets used for other stuff - music etc so if it turns they're not much use though I'll just swap programmes and watch a video instead.