Somerset, KY to Hilton Head Island, SC

Step-by-Step Tutorial:

Long-Routing with Mapopolis 4.xx (PPC)

Somerset, KY to Hilton Head Island, SC …with side-trip to Savannah, GA

Want to plan a route with Mapopolis without determining counties? Want to drive your route with detailed maps open or readily available along the entire route without bumping into the population limit? Perhaps you even want the flexibility to open additional maps on-the-fly while driving well off-route. The following procedure is designed to do these and more with Mapopolis.

Early in the planning stages you’ll need to transfer appropriate maps to a memory card manually, but don’t lose heart. Simply transfer each state involved with your route in its entirety (all county maps with the state major roads map). This should ease your map management tasks considerably while offering excellent off-route driving and routing capabilities on-the-go. One folder per state works well and eases overall map management. I recommend the free Total Commander utility for managing folders and files on your Pocket PC.

State folders will require that you select ‘All Folders’ in ‘Choose Map’ in order to gain simultaneous access to all the states/maps. Don’t worry; you won’t be selecting a single county map from ‘Choose Map’ (only the major roads maps are selected in ‘Choose Map’ with this procedure). Either way, you’ll want to deselect ‘Also Open All Contiguous Maps’ while in ‘Choose Map’ primarily to improve performance (fewer maps open), but you’ll also find this essential for avoiding the NavTeq population licensing limit.

If you don’t know the states involved with your route, you can determine this with Mapopolis using a “rough route” using only major roads maps as outlined in the tutorial below, or with internet access you can alternatively generate the route using a free service such as Yahoo! Driving Directions.

Once your states are transferred to a card you can plan multi-state, door-to-door routes and open detailed-map corridors along your route in minutes. The following tutorial will step you through the process using an example route which spans four states.

Plug-in memory card size recommendations with full-state coverage:

128 mb: multi-state routing ~600 miles or large state coverage

256 mb: cross-country routing ~1200 miles or regional coverage

512 mb: coast-to-coast routing or wide-regional coverage**

1 gb: near-continental coverage**

2 gb: full-continental coverage**

Feel free to experiment and/or modify this procedure for individual preferences or memory constraints…and please offer any suggestions for improvement! This planning model does not adhere to the official Mapopolis procedures found in the User’s Manual, but I think you’ll find it to be a sound, well-reasoned alternative. Memory use is optimized for speed at each stage of the process allowing you to leverage the powerful search features in Mapopolis while planning coast-to-coast routes (on your PPC!). Major road maps are key to this process and efficiency. These maps act as an interactive “basemap” offering wide area searches by city, town, and custom data, as well as, offering the ability to tap-open nearby maps on demand. With these maps, the user can quickly search for a city, town, etc. and follow-up by opening nearby maps visually. With the relevant county maps now open, the search can then be narrowed to a specific address or other Point-Of-Interest, and finally route end-points can be specified. Much of the process is done interactively right on the map, and before you know it, Mapopolis has generated a door-to-door route crossing several states, or even the continent as necessary. You can then scroll along the route and tap-open detailed county-maps or make route modifications as necessary. Always remember to save your route and Mapopolis will open the route-critical maps whenever you recall the route.

** NOTE: Mapopolis currently has an overflow bug (including version 4.42; and at least through beta 4.50.45) that effectively limits the quantity of maps available simultaneously regardless of memory card size. This bug surfaces whenever Mapopolis is given simultaneous access to over 1365 maps (*.mlp files including landmark files) through ‘Choose Map.’ “Access” in this case simply means that Mapopolis has “inventoried” the maps for availability as shown in the current scroll list in ‘Choose Map;’ as you change folders in ‘Choose Map’ or switch to ‘All Folders’ you effectively change the current inventory of accessible maps. The bug surfaces whenever you shutdown Mapopolis with too many maps accessible in the current inventory. Under these conditions, the bug will reset your program settings to defaults upon restart! Since long routing is highly dependent upon custom (non-default) settings, this effectively limits long distance routing somewhat (workarounds exist but are beyond the scope of this procedure). The limit imposed by this bug is rather generous, allowing simultaneous map coverage of 12 or more states on average. That should suffice for most regions, or even coast-to-coast routes, while utilizing full-state folders with ‘All Folders’ selected in ‘Choose Map’ as specified in this tutorial-procedure. In fact, you’ll probably need a 512mb or larger memory card in order to reach this limit due to the average size of maps. But it may be a good idea to keep a backup copy of your settings file ‘mapopst.bin’ found in the Mapopolis program directory on your PPC, just in case.

Like so many other shortcomings in Mapopolis, this bug is avoidable through additional, manual, map-management techniques. For instance, you can forgo state-folders and create two complimentary folders, one with all the maps from all the states covering the first half of your route and the other folder with the second half…add the start and destination state/county maps plus the full-route ‘major roads’ maps and any overlap to both folders…simply select the other folder half-way through the drive. So until this bug is fixed, you can still conceivably carry the entire continent on a 2gb card but you’ll need to break it down into regional folders, perhaps with overlap and sufficient (continental) ‘major roads’ coverage in each regional folder. But I digress.


Before we get started, it’s worth noting that the county icon for Jasper County SC is mis-plotted on the ‘ND’-version ‘major roads’ map for South Carolina! This mapping-error becomes significant in this particular case because this procedure leverages ‘Open Map’ to open detailed-county maps visually while viewing the ‘major roads’ map on-screen. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ‘major roads’ map for South Carolina also proves insufficient in this spot, by failing to connect Hilton Head island (Beaufort County) to the mainland of South Carolina! So, the mis-plotted Jasper County map/icon becomes necessary to supply the connecting roads to Beaufort County for route generation. I’m only using county names here to explain the situation clearly. Rest assured there’s no need to determine county names with this procedure under normal circumstances.	Let’s get started… Create a folder on your memory card named: “0 major roads” (with a leading zero or space or _ ). This folder naming convention takes advantage of the alphabetical listing priorities in Choose Map which eases map selection. Then drop a copy of each ‘major roads’ map associated with your route into this folder. For this routing example, be sure to include the major roads maps for KY, TN, NC, SC, and GA in this folder (2mb), as a minimum. Again, this folder should only contain ‘major roads’ maps; there is only one ‘major roads’ map per state (province [Canada] or country [EU]). Okay, I’ve already revealed the states required for this route, but you can quickly determine this for yourself by generating a “rough route” using ‘major roads’ maps alone. See the next step for some tools and tips available when planning a preliminary route with major roads alone…and then return here with the information... Now, continue the memory card setup by dragging and dropping state folders (folders containing the entire collection of detailed/county maps for a given state) involved with your route onto the card. I recommend one folder per state on the memory card: “KY” (21mb) “TN” (29mb) “NC” (40mb) “SC” (23mb) “GA” (38mb)(or Chatham Co. 1mb) NOTE: a 128 mb memory card will suffice for this particular route if you skip “GA” and simply supply the individual county map covering Savannah, GA (Chatham Co.). To determine this specific map I used Find “Savannah” with only the major roads maps open and tapped the nearby county icon for the name: “Chatham Co.” This was a little extra work in this case, but it just didn’t make sense to load all of “GA” thereby requiring a larger memory card simply to accommodate a short side-trip to Savannah. After all, Chatham Co, GA actually borders “SC.” So in this case it helps to determine a county name, but a larger memory card would eliminate this extra effort. This is simply a tradeoff (quick-and-easy map setup vs. optimal-storage), but this case should give you a good idea of the storage flexibility with Mapopolis. Now start Mapopolis and select Choose Map. Deselect (un-check) “Also Open All Contiguous Maps.” Now select “All Folders.” With all the ‘major roads’ maps in a single folder (“0 major roads”) they should be on top for easy selection (see screenshot above) in Mapopolis. Select each of the ‘major roads’ maps associated with your route. You can rename folders and maps as desired to control listing priorities in Choose Map. But don’t get carried away with this because Choose Map is simply used to select ‘major roads’ maps in this planning model. ‘Major roads’ maps act as a form of “basemap” here while all other maps are opened directly on the map screen using ‘Open Map’…as you’ll see. In fact, don’t even bother opening any other maps at this point because extra maps will only slow search speed… Task time: ~ 15 minutes (you’re well over halfway done in terms of time, and much of this step will never have to be repeated if you simply fill a large memory card with states in your region – cool!)	Perform a Find > Place or Business. Type in “Somerset” There’s not much information about the two “Somerset” options here because the associated county maps are currently closed. You can tap “Origin” on the lower toolbar to help differentiate similar places by distance. Select the second “Somerset” because US-501 doesn’t pass through Somerset in Kentucky. Tap ‘OK’ NOTE: You can use Find to search for any of the following with only the ‘major roads’ maps open. town, city, county, major road (I-95, US-29, Lee Hwy), exit # (EXIT 43A), GPS position (with GPS running) latitude/longitude, categorized user-landmarks, or favorites. NOTE: Don’t worry, once you’ve completed some additional steps to open detail maps in the area, you’ll be able to refine your search for more precise, door-to-door routing as desired. Determining states involved: Let’s be frank, with longer routes it’s not always obvious which states will be involved. Well, we can use the above search options (a subset overall) even when you only have the ‘major roads’ maps open, so it should be simple matter to designate a rough Start and Destination point for quick routing and inspection. Here’s how: I maintain a copy of all the ‘major roads’ maps in a single folder (18mb for U.S. coverage) for this purpose. In your case, a regional folder will suffice (you should have created this folder in the previous step). Always begin with your Start point (unless GPS is supplying it). After Find-ing a place in your Start/Destination area, select maximum detail and tap on, or very near, a major road nearby. This tap-point must be within 0.6 miles (1.0 km) from the major road -- adjust zoom as necessary. Set your Start (Set Start) and Destination (Route To) points in this order and a route will be generated automatically upon tapping Route To. If you would like to search by “Zip Code” in the U.S. without opening county/detail maps, they are now available as series of four regional maplet files (click). If you store one or more of these files in your Mapopolis program folder (\Program Files\Mapopolis\) they will always be available under the search/Find category “Zip Code or Postal Code”

The icon for Somerset will be in the center of the screen. Zoom-out until you can see a dozen or so county icons. If you can’t see the county icons at all, check: Tools > Settings > Map Features > Landmarks	It’s a good idea to add the Somerset location to your Favorites (if this is not enabled by default in Program Settings; I generally leave this option disabled and I add points to Favorites manually as shown above in order to manage them. Otherwise, favorites tend to get pushed off the list over time).	Use Open Map icons (county icons) to open all the county maps surrounding Somerset. This will allow for specific address searches for door-to-door routing as well as maximum routing flexibility to connect with major roads. It would be nice if this step were automated in a future release of Mapopolis, as it is today with certain ‘intelligent’ favorites. Ultimately, these maps should be opened in the background automatically when using Find Route > Choose Start/Destination, so the user can immediately & sequentially select an address for door-to-door routing.

Orange-filled icons indicate open maps. White-filled icons indicate one of two things: the map is either ‘closed,’ or ‘unavailable’ (not present on the device or memory card). It would be nice if ‘closed’ maps and ‘unavailable’ maps were easier to distinguish here. Mapopolis obviously knows this information because the Open Map option is grayed with unavailable maps. I think a gray-filled icon would suffice to distinguish “closed” maps from white-filled “unavailable” maps. “Unavailable” maps should have an ‘Add to Sync list’ option.	It may be adequate to use the town of Somerset as your Starting Point, but feel free to refine your search at this point for door-to-door directions as desired. These additional items are now available using Find because county/detail maps are now open: street address, point of interest (POI), postal code, or contact address. Be sure to ‘Add’ this and any points you plan to use during your trip as Landmarks for maximum flexibility. Here’s how: tap the point on the map, tap-&-hold the point’s popup menu, tap Add Landmark. Note: Add to Favorites is generally available for all points. However, Add Landmark is not available (grayed) for place icons built-into the maps (towns, POI, etc.). I presume this is because creating a new icon over the available icon is simply redundant. However, if you want a Landmark for convenience, use Maplets > Add Location to create the point. The terms Maplet and Landmark are used somewhat interchangeably in Mapopolis.	Now immediately perform another search to pin-point your destination… Find > Place or Business. Type in “Hilton Head” Note: The search filters are invaluable for speeding searches in Mapopolis. In this case, the use of ‘Anywhere’ is acceptable because so few maps are open during this phase of planning.

Again, zoom-out until several surrounding county icons are in view.	Add Hilton Head to your Favorites as required. Note: I’ve assigned a hardware button mapped to: ‘Route to Favorite’ for enroute purposes, but this feature requires a current GPS position. Too bad it doesn’t remember and use the ‘last’ GPS position otherwise.	Open some nearby icons surrounding Hilton Head. It would be nice if this step were automated in a future release of Mapopolis, as it is today with certain ‘intelligent’ favorites (as mentioned previously in this tutorial).

Oops!!! Here’s where the misplaced county map icon causes problems… This error can be very difficult to determine, but I found this error because the route would not calculate (as it normally would with only the start and destination counties with major roads open) so I zoomed-in for a closer look. I then noticed the lack of major roads coverage on Hilton Head Island AND a hole in the county-map details immediately west of Hilton Head Island! I zoomed-out and spotted a spurious icon well-out-of-place in the Atlantic Ocean! Guess what? When I tapped the icon and opened the map, the detail miraculously appeared west of Hilton Head!!! So, while I like to remain as ignorant as possible to the actual names of counties when routing with Mapopolis, this mapping error almost forced me to learn more than I ever wanted to know about counties in South Carolina. I’ve seen this sort of error before with the older NC version major roads maps, so I knew to look for a spurious icon out in the middle of nowhere – that seems to be where you’ll find misplaced county icons (the roads data itself is not misplaced – only the visual icon cue). Such misplaced icons are extremely rare. And it looks like we have another misplaced icon off the coast of Georgia (Camden County, GA). Oh well.	With the county/detail maps now open, feel free to refine your Destination point for door-to-door routing using the additional Find options. If you ‘Set Start’ back in Somerset, then you can simply tap ‘Route To’ here in sequence to get a route. Task time: ~ 5 minutes (to find Start and Destination points, open nearby maps to refine the points for door-to-door routing, and generate a route) The actual route generation time: ~ 10 seconds (539 miles) – now that’s fast!!!	Or, select Navigation > Find Route and select from your Favorites or Landmarks to quickly designate your Start and Destination points. Notice the Reverse, Save, and Recall functions on the bottom toolbar.

Voila! You can always return to this view using Tools > Navigation > Show Route on Map.	What if I want to take another route? If you would prefer to take an alternate road/route at any time after route generation, simply tap a point on the preferred road and select ‘Route Through’ from the popup menu. Mapopolis will immediately generate a new route passing through that point. Generally, a single, strategically-placed point will produce the desired results, but feel free to add as many points as you need to customize your route. Of course, if the preferred road(s) isn’t present due to detail coverage, simply tap-open some additional maps in the area. Or, you can wait until you’ve opened a full corridor of detail maps (counties) along your route in the next steps, but keep in mind that more open maps will slow route calculations proportionally. It’s up to you.	Immediately return to Find Route and *Save* the route.

Here’s what it came up with… Tools > Navigation > Show Directions	These directions can be viewed in the map view using the Step Pane: Tools > Navigation > Show Route Step Pane. Or, tap a step numeral to quickly access this feature. Use the multi-direction puck on your PDA to step through each instruction along your route. Mapopolis literally flies along the route between steps, and will optionally recite each step text aloud (cool!). Up – Fly forward Right – Step forward Down/Left – Step backward

	Hey, the copyright info here appears to be out-of-date since newer data is actually in use here.	You can also save these directions as a user-named HTML file, as desired. This file can be printed.

Now let’s open a corridor of county maps along the route. Detailed maps along your drive can serve you in several ways. They provide POI coverage for enroute stops, while also providing the best detour options. Of course, the “eye-candy” is also nice… Simply tap a lake or park to get the name as it scrolls-by. This process should be automated in Mapopolis for planning purposes. Aspects of this feature could also be used to automatically create an inventory of maps necessary for the route complete with auto-sync options. However, in light of performance issues related to rerouting and POI inventory/search, it would be nice to leave the detail-map corridor closed for enroute driving purposes. This could be done with the addition of ‘dynamic maps’ in Mapopolis. Dynamic maps would allow us to leave the majority of our route maps closed while driving for optimal performance (reroutes and POI inventories/searches), while Mapopolis simply opens/closes maps automatically with reference to the current GPS position.	Select a suitable zoom and start tapping county icons near the route. You don’t have to get carried away, or precise at this point. Notice the orange-filled icons representing those I opened along the route. Task time: ~ 2 minutes. It would be nice if this step were automated in a future release of Mapopolis, complete with user options to control enroute coverage such as: By Radius: 15, 20, 30, 50nm. It would also be nice to utilize “map sets” using an ASCII list with Mapopolis. We should have the option to Save/Recall Map Set, Open/Close Map Set, and Sync Map Set from a zip file, or through ActiveSync, or through an internet connection to the Mapopolis web site.	Once you’ve opened a corridor, zoom-in and adjust the detail in order to check for adequate detail along your route. A few miles either side of route should suffice in most cases. You can always open more on-the-fly as needed enroute.

Here I found an area of sparse detail coverage while checking the coverage along the route.	No problem, just tap the nearby icon and open another map. Note: these maps will normally remain open even through a soft reset of your PDA. However, the route itself will be lost if you perform a soft reset, or shutdown Mapopolis using Tools > Exit. Not a problem: simply recall the route or re-designate the endpoints using favorites, but the route generation-processing is slower due to the additional [corridor] maps open at this time. In this case it takes about twice as long, about 30 seconds in this particular case, to calculate the route.	Final route with a corridor of detailed county maps open along the way. *You’re done!* Total planning time: ~ 20 to 30 minutes -- 15 min. copy states to memory card -- 5 min. designate Start/Destination -- 1 min. generate & save the route -- 2 min. open route corridor maps As you can see, the majority of our time was spent copying states to a memory card. Hopefully, this has served as a one-time process for a variety of routes in, and around, the area. Enjoy!
Some thoughts and dreaming: Mapopolis contains a powerful toolset in support of street navigation with enviable speed, route-quality, map-accuracy, and stability. But let’s face it, Mapopolis can be overwhelming and difficult to master. So why put up with Mapopolis’ patchwork interface and general disregard for map management automation? We all have our reasons, but one reason would have to be the adaptability of the available toolset. The above procedure is just one example of this. In this case, Mapopolis was not specifically designed to handle long-distance routing (and neither are many PDA navigators), but a flexible toolset allows us to handle this chore where many PDA navigators fail. Mapopolis, as it turns out, is a rather strong long-distance tool due to the underlying map structure (highway and county map complement) which is readily adaptable for long-route support. We can only dream of loading up a 2gb card with the entire continent while maintaining good planning response and navigation performance. This long-routing procedure should give you some insights into the potential of Mapopolis and PDA-based navigators in general. I’m convinced that mainstream PPC hardware is up to the task, and without sacrificing performance (400MHz+, 64MB+ RAM, SD/CF slot, 3.5” QVGA color TFT touch-screen, 2002/2003 PPC OS, etc.). Sadly, long-routing performance is abysmal on today’s crop of PDA navigators due to lazy programming techniques and a lack of vision in this area. As gigabyte SD cards approach commodity pricing levels ($50) I yearn for planning wizards and mapping techniques that enable nationwide flexibility while maintaining application response and performance. Basically, with progressive planning wizards and efficient mapping techniques a PPC could rival even DVD-based navigation systems in terms of planning performance, routing speed, map-accuracy, route-quality, map flexibility (both on and off-route), ease-of-use, and even navigation-guidance options. As you’ve seen, Mapopolis has most of the pieces in place to plan and drive a cross-country route. However, map setup and route planning tasks are manually intensive, while enroute-navigation performance (reroutes, POI inventory/searches, etc.) degrades as route-length grows. This is not necessary. We can only hope that, someday, planning-wizards will automatically optimize program settings for route length as necessary. During planning, required maps should be opened progressively (efficiently; automatically) as the user narrows the search for route points. Mapopolis already provides an adequate basemap to support such long-distance planning-automation through the use of ‘major roads’ maps, POI, and icon proximity features. A corridor spanning the route could then be inventoried for map availability so any missing maps could be cued for automatic sync to the device. We can also dream about efficient map handling for the driving-phase based upon GPS position (i.e. “dynamic maps”). Maps should open and close “dynamically” based upon the vehicle’s position in order to optimize the memory footprint for performance while revolutionizing off-route flexibility without worrying about the population limit. Mapopolis’ current route ‘recall’ function can already provide the foundation for such memory-efficient innovation enroute. Just imagine. Mapopolis’ NavCard product for the Palm platform is a step in the right direction, but routing performance is much slower than should be necessary with proper road-selection priorities over longer routes (i.e. major roads prioritized for routes over 200 miles, dropping route generation to less than 1 minute in all cases).