› Forums › Geocaching in Wisconsin › Announcements › Dissemination of public information

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  • 04/20/2008 at 7:12 pm #1726416
    2_Stand

      Eventually ya gotta cash in.
      Apparently Topozone doesn’t believe in the google-type ad-link for-pay model. They went to a pay-for-play model.
      I went away.
      I need that info for my pursuits. My tax dollars created that info. Assuredly they are a non-government website, a portal to the data.
      But their portal is not worth my money.

      Upon learning of the situation, a quick two-step googling found me:http://www.acme.com/mapper/. I found it on a Find-A-Grave forum thread (http://www.findagrave.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&topic=22827&gonew=1). A button on the top-right part of the page switches to topo.

      It seems to work better on Firefox than IE, like other mapping programs I’ve seen. It also appears to be more user-friendly.

      04/20/2008 at 8:24 pm #1888184
      GrouseTales

        Thanks for the link. I was just looking for Topo Zone last night, and noticed they require a paid membership. Not worth it in my opinion, especially with my mapping software at home.

        This website should fill the void.

        04/21/2008 at 1:23 am #1888185
        Hotdogs_Off_Trail

          Thanks, I also notice last night that my favorite Topozone had been absorbed by Trails.com and wanted $$$. I logged onto the acme site, but how do you put in our coordinates?

          04/21/2008 at 1:36 am #1888186
          2_Stand

            I just tried something, and it worked right quick.
            Copied and pasted the coords directly from the cache description page to the ACME Mapper 2.0 “Find” box.

            04/21/2008 at 3:52 am #1888187
            sandlanders

              I didn’t like the new deal for topozone either.

              I’ve been a fan of the paper topo maps for years–nothing like a set of contour lines to set one’s heart racing–and the direct link on a cache page let us know what terrain we were getting into or do some fine tuning, even if some of the maps have info that is out of date.

              The new site linked here has been loading slowly for me (dial-up), so I’ll be checking it out more thoroughly later.

              Thanks for the info!

              04/21/2008 at 5:44 am #1888188
              Team Deejay

                There are a few other alternatives as well. You might like http://www.mytopo.com. This one is pretty similar to how topozone worked.

                You also might want to try USA Photomaps, which also has topo maps. You can find this software at jdmcox.com.

                And note that Topozone isn’t charging you for the data (which would be illegal, by the way) but for use of their website. I don’t like it either, but there isn’t much we can do about it.

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