GPS and mapping software - Ballpark for 2008 budget

Hello All,

I am a Lieutenant with a volunteer fire & rescue department. Our
department is a bit unusual, in that our fire district crosses a
number of governmental boundaries. Our district covers part of
Georgia, part of North Carolina, part of a small city, part state
forest and part national forest. Providing good maps to our members
has been an ongoing problem for years. Thankfully a great many of our
members have been here for decades and know the area. However, many of
our new members are unfamiliar with portions of our district and our
mutual aid departments are unfamiliar with portions of our district.

We would like to create good maps for our department and our mutual
aid departments in 2008. To that end, we need to get a ballpark amount
to put into our 2008 budget. So, I'm looking for recommendations and
some prices for good software packages and GPS units. I'm trying to
get to the right people in each state, city and federal office to
determine if they can export the existing map data for us. If we can
get the raw data it should save us a lot of work. Provided of course,
that our mapping program is able to import the data.

We need to add symbols to our maps. We need to indicate locations like
lakes, ponds, dry hydrants, wet hydrants, locked gates, helicopter
landing zones, private roads and trails.

We also need to create easy to use maps. At present, we are leaning to
multi page maps in a book format. The map book would have a street
index and the maps would be in a grid system. Our calls are
dispatched to us with a street address. For example, we may be called
to residence at 123 Oak Trail for a fire alarm activation. Having a
street index is very important to us.

I'm hoping the mapping software does not have a huge learning curve.
We all have full time jobs. We all have families. We all already
volunteer a lot of our time to training and responding to emergency
calls. If the software has too much of a learning curve, I'm afraid no
one will step forward to spend the time learning it and maintaining
our maps.

TIA,
Mark G.
Lieutenant, Sky Valley / Scaly Mountain Volunteer Fire & Rescue
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mg wrote:



You might consider pro GPS Mapping receivers that can accept
DRGs and other freely available mapping and GIS sources.
http://www.trimble.com/mgis.shtml

I'd focus on this importing idea, ie. you're adding to imported maps thus
allowing occasionally updates of the map data.


To allow this addition, I expect you'd have to specify the symbol locations
in longitude,latitude,street address format; which are then overlaid on the
displayed maps.


Once you're at the actual street address the GPS s/w should accept the
positon data from a GPS receiver & use this to display the relevant map, &
overlay the symbols (previously mentioned) of interest to your crew.


It's really the symbol location list that would have to be maintained, not
the maps themselves.



I hope these 100 (binary) comments above help.

Please post any updates here. It's an interesting idea you have, with many
applications!.