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good topo site?

muddy

muddy

Well-Known Member
I'm having a heckuva time finding a website that prints out decent looking aerial maps. I'm currently using Google Earth but everything comes out very dark and hard to read.

It could be operator error, or I could lay blame on one of the kids tampering with the printer settings.
 
Why do you want printed topo maps? I stopped using those when I got a smart phone and could get topos to go. What's the advantage to prints?
Try Terraserve.com
 
My phone is sorta old and busted, I like to have the actual aerial in hand while I'm walking around scouting.
 
Google earth is the best I have found, it may be your settings on the printer. If you can print them in color they are a lot easier to read. You can save them and take it to a local print shop if you don't have a good color printer, it's pretty cheap.
 
After I submitted that reply, all manner of benefits of printed maps occurred to me: you can write on them, there's no battery life to worry about, you don't need a signal to use it, the list goes on...
 
PM me your coordinates, and I'll work up a sweet arial photo that has the hill shade overlaid on top. It gives a sweet, almost 3D rendition of your land. I'm sure I could try to overlay the topography somehow too.
 
Iowa geographic map server (iowa state university runs the site). You can search by sec-twp-rng, nearest city. The quality varies by county and how recently they have flown, but for the most part all are new(er).there are simple aerials, vegetation maps, topography maps, and you can get historical maps all the way back to the 30's I believe, kinda neat to see that stuff too. The zoom features aren't as fast as Google earth but I use them both about the same. If you need any help figuring it out pm me I use it on a weekly basis for work.
 
You also may need to check your printer preferences to make sure you are printing with the photo quality box checked instead of regular print settings, otherwise you will get the darker, blochier prints.
 
rc10pt said:
Iowa geographic map server (iowa state university runs the site). You can search by sec-twp-rng, nearest city. The quality varies by county and how recently they have flown, but for the most part all are new(er).there are simple aerials, vegetation maps, topography maps, and you can get historical maps all the way back to the 30's I believe, kinda neat to see that stuff too. The zoom features aren't as fast as Google earth but I use them both about the same. If you need any help figuring it out pm me I use it on a weekly basis for work.
Click to expand...

This is the site I use to make my maps. I take an arial satellite photo as the base photo, then overlay the same area with a hill shade photo at about 25% transparency. Looks awesome. I'll try to post one that I did last year. Just need to go to work to do so.
 
Thanks for the suggestions for both web sites and printer settings, will look into that.

Figured out how to save images from Google Earth, will load up a flash drive and hit a printer somewhere for sure.
 
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