It's pretty simple. You can trace routes and add text annotations, measure the length of routes and construct an altitude profile; define a printer area and print it out. It works much better to drop the print output (Tiff) into Photoshop and adjust it for your printer. Printing on 8-1/2 x 11 paper doesn't get you much, but printing on 11 x 17 or 13 x 19 makes really nice maps. The Topo "Scan" is not as fine as it would be "really nice" to have, but is about the information you can see (unaided) on a standard Topo map.

Working with the Etrex GPS unit is easy. Mark waypoints on the computer, upload them to the handheld unit.

Overall, it works really well and is easy to learn and use. It requires a bit of an investment up front, but for the serious off-trail traveller, it is money well spent....

If I import the tracks as individual waypoints, the waypoints are displayed as HUGE diamonds on the map that overlap and make it impossible to follow the track. The max zoom is insufficient to clearly display the tracks, but the magnify option zooms in nicely. The only problem is the magnify option also magnifies the waypoint icons, so they still overlap. For the Mid-Atlantic map, these waypoint diamonds are about 200 feet corner to corner.

If I bring the tracks in as complete routs, there is no way to make small changes to fit the track to the minor inconsistencies in the elevation map. For example, when the GPS shows me walking a mostly flat section and TOPO has me descending into a ravine; if I remember navigating around the edge of the ravine, it's obvious the track in that area needs to be tweaked to miss the ravine. I might be able to draw a new track if the lines of the existing track were a little thinner, but as with the waypoints, at max magnify the lines are very thick and obscure the topo lines. When I try to start a new track, the draw tool functions as a track selector over the existing (too thick) track, so I can't correct what is already there. The only option is to delete small sections of the map and try to redraw them from memory or a print out. This process might work, but I think I could do it a lot faster in a paint program.

There doesn't seem to be any way to turn off a waypoint or track display completely, since all the waypoints are ultimately displayed in the "All Waypoints" master list which won't turn off. Strangely, if I delete a waypoint in a custom rout, the waypoint is also deleted from the master list, so once a waypoint is added to a rout it can't be removed without also removing it from the entire map.

Overall it's a nice program and probably works fine for mapping out long, straight paths. It's useless for my purposes, though. They need to add some better editing and viewing features, such as interactive rout editing with drag handles on the waypoints, and some control over how and when the waypoints are displayed.