Yours well wisher

Sayed Waqar Haider
sayedwaqarh@gmail.com

Google Maps might be good for people in cities but they are rendered useless while on a highway where we go offline. Moreover, mobile phones are too small for clear vision while driving and laptops are not safe to be handled by drivers. I travel almost every month from up north to Karachi and back. The best choices I find in order of priority are units meant for cars or handheld units with reliable car mounts. I guess, for long runs, Google Maps are not a choice for me at all.

For the handheld or car mounted I am left with choices of offline maps (which can be stored in a device) from Naqsha.net and Open Street Maps.

Naqsha.net has some very good maps of our cities, highways and streets but they have a huge price tag. Moreover, the maps are not updated as often as they should be and some major important roads were missing when I traveled last month. The method of updating the users is still too primitive, one has to keep asking those guys about updates. Making and following routes in one of the major areas where major improvements are required.

The last option is to use offline Open Street Maps, but I have not tried that as yet. There are some very very easy methods to download these maps to your PC and use them in your GPS via some software like MapSource or or directly. But then again, I have had my experience with Naqsha.net and besides all the cons which I have mentioned and perhaps more which I still don’t know about, I am confident using these maps. They have brought me home so many times. I think, I would be justified in saying, “Naqsha.net has been my best co-pilot so far.”

Another choice to be considered are maps coming up from PkMaps. These guys have done some real good work voluntarily and soon they might overtake corporate sector in their professionalism. I haven’t used their maps on highways but their maps of major cities are awesome. The city details is where it leaves the Naqsha.net way behind. These maps are free of cost and extremely useful in cities, for now.

If I summarize my choices according to performance, without prejudice, the order would be:
For long routes
1. Naqsha.net (Routing might be a problem but positioning is excellent)
2. Open Street Maps
3. PkMaps
4. Google Maps (this could be on top if we had these maps offline)

For commuting in a city
1. Naqsha.net (excellent search and lots of points of interest)
2. PkMaps (where else would you find a 100% correct maps of Abbottabad)
3. Open Street Maps
3. Google Maps (this could be on top if we had these maps offline)

Despite putting Naqsha.net on top, I am not going to renew my update contract. Reason; the price. I can easily get something like that for free and there is a great chance (and potential that I see in PkMaps) that their maps might become even better with time.

Google Maps might be good for people in cities but they are rendered useless while on a highway where we go offline. Moreover, mobile phones are too small for clear vision while driving and laptops are not safe to be handled by drivers. I travel almost every month from up north to Karachi and back. The best choices I find in order of priority are units meant for cars or handheld units with reliable car mounts. I guess, for long runs, Google Maps are not a choice for me at all.

For the handheld or car mounted I am left with choices of offline maps (which can be stored in a device) from Naqsha.net and Open Street Maps.

Naqsha.net has some very good maps of our cities, highways and streets but they have a huge price tag. Moreover, the maps are not updated as often as they should be and some major important roads were missing when I traveled last month. The method of updating the users is still too primitive, one has to keep asking those guys about updates. Making and following routes in one of the major areas where major improvements are required.

The last option is to use offline Open Street Maps, but I have not tried that as yet. There are some very very easy methods to download these maps to your PC and use them in your GPS via some software like MapSource or or directly. But then again, I have had my experience with Naqsha.net and besides all the cons which I have mentioned and perhaps more which I still don’t know about, I am confident using these maps. They have brought me home so many times. I think, I would be justified in saying, “Naqsha.net has been my best co-pilot so far.”

Another choice to be considered are maps coming up from PkMaps. These guys have done some real good work voluntarily and soon they might overtake corporate sector in their professionalism. I haven’t used their maps on highways but their maps of major cities are awesome. The city details is where it leaves the Naqsha.net way behind. These maps are free of cost and extremely useful in cities, for now.

If I summarize my choices according to performance, without prejudice, the order would be:
For long routes
1. Naqsha.net (Routing might be a problem but positioning is excellent)
2. Open Street Maps
3. PkMaps
4. Google Maps (this could be on top if we had these maps offline)

For commuting in a city
1. Naqsha.net (excellent search and lots of points of interest)
2. PkMaps (where else would you find a 100% correct maps of Abbottabad)
3. Open Street Maps
3. Google Maps (this could be on top if we had these maps offline)

Despite putting Naqsha.net on top, I am not going to renew my update contract. Reason; the price. I can easily get something like that for free and there is a great chance (and potential that I see in PkMaps) that their maps might become even better with time.

Many thanks guys. You made us proud.
Aqeel

I need the Pakistan,s Vector maps on .gst format.
can anybody help me out.

I need it to use in a gps monitoring software.

Good work. I have joined your forum and i am willing to help anyway i can in this good deed. I am a resident of islamabad and own a satglobal usb gps receiver so i might be good use to you.

Tell me how can i help in mapping islamabad.

I have dropped a message on your forum as well.

Thanks

I doubt what we are doing here is going to help your enemy more than how much NAQSHA.NET’s GPS map or Google Earth is going to. They are selling it for 120US$. I think your enemy will have the budget to buy something as cheap as that.

I even think they might have a better version.

We are just trying to develop a few free maps that can be helpfull to the common man. The accuracy of these maps is questionable as well because they are based on Google Imagery, Personal observations and interpretations. Apart from that the conventional GPS devices that will use these maps have a degree or error so that it cannot be used for such purposes.

I guess the Pakistani government has already taken this fact into consideration before permitting NAQSHA.NET to startup such a mapping service in Pakistan.

By the way, We already have a map of Islamabad and Karachi on our website http://pkmaps.freeforums.org/ .

Have a nice day!!

Remember even the person sitting next to you might be your enemy.

Regards,
Kifayat

These maps are also Helpfull to our Enimies also, so becarefull.

Khan

All of you are invited. We’ll use the same methodology as Kifayat recommended. We already have a base map to work on. All the data will be absolutely FREE for sharing and for others to work on and improve and merge together to give a better map.

I have been looking around for ideas on how the other groups around the world make their maps that are free to the general public to use on their Garmin GPS.

Examples of such free and open map making groups are:

http://www.malsingmaps.com : GPS Portal of Malaysia and Singapore. They have created their own free routable Garmin maps for Malaysia and Singapore which are available to the open public.

http://www.malfreemaps.com : Malaysia & Singapore Free GPS map forum. Most of these members were previously part of the http://www.malsingmaps.com group but have now setup their own forum. They have created their own free routable Garmin maps for Malaysia and Singapore which are available to the open public.

http://www.gwprojects.org/gps/ : New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project
for Garmin Mapping GPS. They have created their own free routable Garmin maps for New Zealand which are available to the open public.

http://rotweilermaps.com/ : A Thailand based community with people from around the world who have made their own free routable Garmin maps for Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong which are available to the open public.

All these communities are free forums running on minimum contributions and I have personally tested many of these maps on my Garmin on the road and they are no where less than Garmin official maps standards.

The reason I am so focused on Garmin GPS maps (apart from the fact that I have a Garmin Nuvi200 and Garmin Mobile XT on my cell phone) is that it is a market leader in GPS devices and its Garmin Mobile XT software can be used by anyone on any Smartphone that has an internal GPS or using an eternal GPS. Another reason is that the source data, tools and utilities available for building Garmin routable GPS maps are in abundance and almost free.

All these communities take their basic source data from Map Centre (http://mapcenter2.cgpsmapper.com/ ) and Google Earth. Local contributors provide POIs via emails etc and these updates are made to maps on a regular basis.

A good guide on making your own free customized routable Garmin map is available at http://www.malsingmaps.com/wiki/index.php/Mapping_Reference . This guide explains graphically how we can use various tools like GPSMapEdit to create our own GPS maps. It explains GPS map building concepts in detail and all the tools you will require for your map building as well as websites where you can download these tools are also listed.

For the data source, MapCentre has millions of maps. So it’s best to use the following website http://gpsmapsearch.com/ to search for a smaller list of sources available at MapCentre and download them.

The GPSMapEdit utility as I mentioned earlier can use data downloaded from MapCentre as well as display Google Images in the background in real time or from a system cache. This utility is shareware. The basic free version is complete to map routable GPS maps. But in order to access Google images you have to purchase a license. You can download this utility free from http//www.geopainting.com/ .

I hope all this information (which many of you might already have known about before) is helpful in making your own routable GPS maps.

PS: Do let me know if you are planning on starting a forum or community to make free open source routable GPS street maps of Pakistan on my email kafie2002@yahoo.com . I am a Petroleum Geologist working abroad so I really have never had the time and space to make my own GPS maps. But I can offer as much technical help as possible in making a free open source routable GPS street map of Pakistan.

Good luck!!

Kifayat Hussain

It will be very hard to get a free complete routable Garmin map of Pakistan like the one naqsha.net has developed and is developing.

You can get a free OpenStreetMap of Pakistan and many other countries from http://downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/pakistan

Here you all can download a Garmin map of Pakistan in img format and POI data for your Garmin units.

I haven’t tested these maps on the road so far for accuracy as I don’t live in Pakistan but i have had a look at them on my Garmin device in GPS simulation mode and they look good enough.

This is an OpenStreetMap and made by various people contributing to the OpenStreetMap community. If you use these files please make sure you attribute the OpenStreetMap community by including a link to http://www.openstreetmap.org.

Kindly don’t use these maps for any commercial purpose or sale. Open source is meant to be free to use for personal use and not to be sold or used in any form commercially without prior approval from source/author.

Yes we are free to develop and enhance these maps in terms of new data and modifications. You can use these maps as a base for editing the maps as you feel accurate in applications like GPSMapEdit.

The direct download links are:

Garmin .img file: http://downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/pakistan/pakistan.img.zip

POI gpx file:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/pakistan/pakistan.poi.gpx.zip

Note: The Garmin .img file is not routable but its good enough with many major roads and entities mapped. The cities that have been mapped well are Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.

This is an OpenStreetMap and made by various people contributing to the OpenStreetMap community. If you use these files please make sure you attribute the OpenStreetMap community by including a link to http://www.openstreetmap.org.

Have a good time with your Garmins.

Kifayat Hussain