Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives GPS for backroads, forest roads, rural communities?

Currently mostly using a satellite enabled laptop that is a good mapping aid but no help driving unless with an alert and clued in shotgun navigator.

A handheld you are here go that way doesn't do much for me while road limited at driving speeds. If anybody finds say a Garmin 60/62 whatever series a driving aid please tell me about it.

Asked for a Garmin 1490T to try for Christmas with a 5" screen and got a Magellan RoadMate 1700 with a 7" screen but I can only make it work with strict municipal addresses - outside the city limits but with a valid post office address that uses the municipal name is unrecognized and unlisted, rural communities go unrecognized and all the other issues. I may learn but it's an uphill struggle.

Again I'm not talking on foot navigating on topo maps, landowner issues and all the rest I'm talking cruising back roads, very back roads, finding popular and pretty spots to throw clay birds on open to the public lands given coordinates and other such.

Suggestions for other places to post/ask gratefully solicited.

I am using the Delorme Topo USA on a laptop.

The laptop screen is 15" corner to corner, so, it's kind of big which is good and bad.

I'd like to find a Notebook that it would work on.

Shows you where you're at even off road.

Works great!

My Garmin Handheld with topo software shows almost every road and little seasonal creek in the mountains of Washington, Oregon Idaho & Montana. The screen is tiny, but it leaves a bread crumb trail and shows all elevations and every obscure logging road.

Same experience here with my handheld Garmin. I've used it in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah and so far it's been good enough to for all the roads and trails I've needed to find. It would be a little harder than a large screen navigator to follow constantly but that isn't really necessary when driving on dirt roads. All you need to know is intersections or turn-offs and mileage.

I'll cast a vote for the Garmin as well.

I use my garmin 60csx with the 24k topo maps, show all the streets, resturants, landmarks, etc for regular street navigation. I punch in addresses to get from place to place all the time. Works just like a regular car GPS.