As you know, on maps there is such a thing as scale. Travel maps are created so that travelers can then simply navigate the area and go to the desired point, according to a pre-approved route. Much more accurate maps are used by the military. When conducting combat operations, every detail, even the smallest one, is important. After all, it can play a decisive role in preserving human lives and achieving victories in the theater of operations. Legendary cards General Staff The 500 meters is now available to everyone. The information on them was strictly classified for a long time. Now their use is permitted for legislative level. The latest samples of maps in scales of 1:500 and 1:250 are available to all our customers without exception. We have absolutely all the sheets that are digitized and linked to electronic maps for navigators.

What are the benefits of such cards?

Everything is presented in the smallest detail. You will know about the type of forest, the height of trees, the presence of fords, bridges, wells with drinking water, terrain height, etc. In general, it will be possible to obtain almost any information. A scale of 1 centimeter – 500 meters guarantees a high degree of detail, which will allow you to accurately locate any object.

To order, it will be enough to name the region of the Russian Federation that is needed. There is no need to study prefabricated sheets and delve into the intricacies of the coordinate cartographic grid. Using these maps is very simple, because their designations are intuitive and known to each of us since childhood.

How much does it cost

You can download maps of the General Staff for free, but the quality is usually very poor. Also, not all sheets may be accessible, and the most interesting areas are usually missing. In order not to deprive yourself, use the services of our store. It will be possible to download the map of the General Staff only after the payment procedure.

Maps of the headquarters of the German Wehrmacht and the Red Army (Workers' and Peasants' Red Army) were compiled and printed both in the USSR in the period from 1925 to 1941, and in Germany, in preparation for the war, in the period 1935-41. On maps printed in Germany, the name in German is often printed next to the Russian name of a village, river, etc.

These are great wartime tactical maps. It was on these maps that the commanders of formations and units, intelligence, etc., of both the Soviet and German armies worked.

Some of the maps can be found on the Internet, on German and American websites, some were obtained from other sources. Unfortunately, the cards we have are mostly blank, i.e. on them not applied defense lines, dugouts, trenches, pillboxes. Only roads (down to the smallest ones), settlements (down to individual houses) and other interesting objects (chapels, churches, mills, ferries). Many objects disappeared in the post-war period and are therefore of interest to search engines. We will select maps for the area you are interested in.

Collection sheet.

Collection sheet.

Maps can be downloaded as archives. Order the missing sheets of cards and we will send them.

Useful link to determine the letters and numbers of the cards of interest.

If you are interested in georeferenced maps for your navigator, please contact us through the section.

Topographic Maps

Topographic map is an integral part of a long hike, a mushroom walk, orienteering and driving a quad over rough terrain. Legend on topographic maps such as:

Forest, urban settlements, power lines, bushes, swamps, difficult areas, dirt roads, trails, fords

and so on. will allow you to walk through the forest, away from populated areas, in a safe way. Topographic maps of the areas are offered in two formats:
- cards with extensions .ozfx, .ecw, .Gif, .png with location references for use on personal computer (PC), laptop with the operating system Windows XP, 7, 8, as well as tablets and mobile devices running operating system Android 2.2 and higher.
- Cards with extension .jnx with location references for use in tourist navigators of the company with support for the service BirdsEye.
Detailed topographic scale maps 1:25000 are now most in demand among both mushroom pickers and travelers due to the accuracy of the terrain data and other information they contain. Our online store presents topo maps in Scales:
throughout the western Russia to the Urals, including O. New Earth and partially some squares of central Russia, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation.
- 1:50000 (1 cm = 500 m or 500 meters) throughout the western Russia to the Urals, also some squares of central Russia, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation.
- 1:100000 (1cm = 1km or kilometers) throughout western Russia to the Urals, also some areas of central Russia, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation.
- 1:200000 (1 cm = 2 km or 2 km) throughout Russia, partly in neighboring countries, CIS territories, countries of Western Europe and Africa.
- 1:500000 (1 cm = 5 km or 5 km) throughout Russia, partly in neighboring countries, CIS territories, countries of Western Europe and Africa.

Those who want a lot of strange things can google “Textbook on military topography.” I myself studied at the university using it. There is a ton of old and useless material for tourists.

What will happen in this article:

So, what is useful to know about GS cards and what is needed in practice.

Origin of map sheets and their nomenclature (number)

To begin with, a little repetition of what was in previous articles.

This is what it looks like:

File with extension .gif- just a picture. How you can have sex with her separately is described in paragraph 2. And the file with the extension .map- the file that the Ozi Explorer program will open will find the path to the picture specified in it (you downloaded both files into the same folder, right?) and show you a map on the monitor. The program will understand that this is a map, each of its points corresponds to some geographical coordinates. (The same two files, a picture and a .map, for each map sheet will also be available on decent distributions from torrents.)

Now everything is simple. "File-print". You indicate what scale you have, the paper format and its orientation, and that’s it. The program also allows you to print not the entire sheet, but a selected fragment.

Also, maps to scale, like Ozi Explorer, can be printed by the Global Mapper program.

If you followed one of these points, except 1a, then when printing on A4 paper you will spend 6 sheets per sheet of card, and on A3 paper 3 sheets. Moreover, most of the paper will go into scraps. And then you will need to glue the sheets from the printer into one sheet of card. It's nerdy, but fun. Not having an A3 printer at home, I used Ozi Explorer to send the card for printing to a virtual printer, which gave me PDF files, which I already carried on a flash drive to the A3 printing service near the metro.

Of course, you can forget to print to scale, but just take the image file with the map, print it using the usual Windows tools on one sheet (well, at least A3, otherwise it will turn out to be completely pornography) and rejoice. True, then you will already have a map without a specific scale at all. It definitely won’t work to measure distances and calculate directions either. It will only work as an overview map.

How else to determine the scale?

In the pictures above, where I drew the origin of the map sheets, the length and width of the map sheet are written in degrees. As you understand, in practice you will often receive sheets where all the information outside the map frame has been cut off, including the inscription on the scale (there was once a secrecy label there, which was removed, and a lot of other information that interfered with use maps in the electronic navigator). But the frame always remains (if the person who scanned the card is not a scoundrel), and by calculating the width or length of the sheet in angular measures from it, you can determine the scale. Another way to determine the scale of the GS map will be discussed.

General Staff maps in electronic form

When planning a trip at the computer or on the navigator screen, we deal with maps of the General Staff in in electronic format, unnatural for them.

For viewing on a computer the best one is the one I have already named SAS Planet; you can also view them on the website Routes.ru or nakarte.me.

From the Android smartphone screen: LOCUS MAP. You need to add a package of cards to it from Evgeniy, where there are GS cards and many others, or from anygis.ru. Instructions for the application from me.

In the Garmin travel navigator It is convenient to upload GS maps using the same website Routes.ru (download the kmz file and put it in the Garmin - Custom maps folder on the device. Detailed instructions). You can also add JNX to Garmin as part of the halyard. Such files can be generated using the same nakarte.me or SAS Planet (instructions). In order for your navigator to display JNX files, you need to buy a subscription to their BirdsEye Satellite Imagery service from Gamine or do something with the device. I have never seen people who bought this subscription.

How to use geographic coordinates (with GPS or by astronomical observations) to find a location on a map

On many downloaded map files, you will see a border around the perimeter of the map. The frame is cool. The presence of a frame allows you to get geographic coordinates (yours or another object) with a paper map in your hands, without a computer and a pocket GPS navigator. For what? The only situation that comes to my mind is a group of tourists who had an emergency, and they do not have a GPS navigator, but they have a map of the General Staff and the ability to contact rescuers. It usually happens that there is GPS, but there is no connection. In practice, I had to do the opposite, using the coordinates in the device, and point my finger on a piece of paper at the place where we were (well, I didn’t have a map of the General Staff in the navigator in electronic form!). In one of the previous articles I already talked a little, I gave this example.

This is that rare moment when the “degrees, minutes, seconds” coordinate format comes in handy. (Read about other coordinate formats and which one is better to use)

For example. Our coordinates are 55°41’10”C 36°3’50”E. Where are we on the map?

At each corner of the map grid, the coordinates of that corner are indicated. Alternating black and white stripes indicate minutes of latitude or longitude. Dots next to the stripes are separated by tens of seconds.

Let's find the latitude first. The width of the bottom edge of the sheet is 55°40’00”, we put one more strip up. We will have 41’, and we reach the nearest point - that’s another 10”. We put a ruler there.

We perform a similar operation to find longitude. We will only move to the right from the corner of the map. The coordinates of the left edge of the sheet are 36°00’00”, we are missing 3’50” from the required 36°3’50” - that’s three stripes and five dots. We put a ruler there.

At the intersection of the lines there will be a turn in the road, which I circled in yellow.

Having determined your location on the ground and found it on the map, you can carry out the reverse operation by finding your coordinates. You just need to draw perpendiculars to the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the map, and then count the required number of stripes and dots from the corners of the map. The resulting coordinates... well... uh... dictate to the rescuers, probably.

Rectangular (kilometer) grid coordinates and Plane rectangular coordinates

Every textbook, presentation of tourist clubs and gurus in cartography considers it their duty to talk about it, to waste the darkness of their own and other people’s time. And only the 1977 textbook on military topography says that this garbage is used for target designation by artillerymen. Well, it's easier for them that way. The question is, why bother torturing your head with unnecessary information when the whole world and all other maps use a geographic coordinate system? Why do tourists need this system?

Yes, it gives us a coordinate grid with which we determine the scale of the map, if it is not indicated anywhere else!

Look at the numbers I circled in red. This is the number of kilometers from... Narnia/the country of the elves/the tail of the World Serpent, it doesn’t matter where from, it doesn’t change the essence, no one has been interested in their absolute meaning for a long time. Who cares?

We are interested in the difference between them. As you can see, it is 1 km. I wrote above that the coordinate grid on maps is every 2 cm. Divide 1 km by 2, it turns out 500 meters per 1 cm! This means this is a fragment of the “five hundred meter” map (1:50,000).

Sometimes, for convenience, these numbers are placed in the middle of the map and written next to the grid stripes. This allows us to determine the scale of the map even if the map frame is cropped.

Symbols on topographic maps

Common notations. Nothing complicated, but you need to watch it a couple of times. Here are a lot of pictures under the cut: