The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Saturday 16 June 2007

Anquet Maps - Quirky Thing!

Last year I bought the Anquet version of the OS mapping of Great Britain. Having ummed and arrrred over whether the £125 price tag was worth it, and having since used it extensively, I can now declare that for us it was a worthwhile purchase.

However, the software is not, in my opinion, entirely intuitive to use.

With practice, I seem to have grasped the basics and I've been getting on quite well with it with plotting the LEJOG route, but a few weeks ago I had an incident where a spurious waypoint appeared that made a 10 mile day into something like a 50 mile day. I couldn't find the spurious point to delete it (you follow it so far and then you page down and the tell-tale straight line is no longer there). After running out of ways of solving the problem I went for what must have been the easiest option of deleting the entire day and starting it again. I thought at the time that it must have been my error.

Tonight, Husband plotted a day (his first one!). Having shouted instructions across the room to him, he declared that something had gone awry. Upon inspection it turned out that a point had been added to the previous route section (ie not the one upon which he was working) making a 19 mile day into a 350 mile one. After trying to back-track to delete it for fifteen minutes or so, I again reached the same conclusion that the route section had to be deleted and re-plotted.

One such incident I could put down to operator error. Two similar incidents by different operators and with no evidence of the mystery way point actually existing, I have to surmise is a bug in the software. And very annoying it is too.

So, we've ended today just one small section ahead of where we were two days ago (but, hey, at least we're heading North now!).

1 comment:

  1. I too have found the Anquet maps interface to be a total joke! Save your money or get a different product.

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