You can create a set of off-line terrain, satellite, and street maps using a program called Googleak.
It is undocumented and a little quirky.

Googleak and the data (maps) you download can be burned to a DVD and will run stand-alone on any Windows machine.

The map data comes down in ‘Tiles’. That is how Google can let you pan around in a web browser while accessing Terabytes of data. You are only looking at a few tiles at a time. Googleak allows you to download blocks of tiles and save them on your hard drive.

I changed the conf.cfg file to point to D: and then created a DVD with my data and the program - works great!

Tips, comments and requests:

Googleak provides a ‘backdoor’ direct link to Google, Yahoo, etc. map database. Use some common sense… and only download the data that you need for your AOA. If everybody tries to download the world, this backdoor will be locked.

‘Hybrid’ will give you both Satellite and Street data.

Keep your ‘Tiles’ selection below 10,000. 1,000 seems to work best. If you try to download 60,000 Tiles, you will be challenged by the Google server and have to enter a secret code to validate you are not a ‘Bot’ doing a bulk download.

Right click on everything on the screen to get various pull down menus.

Right Clicking on the main screen in the 'Hand' (pan) mode will allow you to set the zoom level.

If you select too many tiles, your screen will go blank while the program is calculating. Be patient!  or… Select smaller blocks.

Green Tiles means you have already downloaded the tiles.
Yellow Tiles means you do not have these tiles.


Download - plus some discussion here: Googleak

Download both googleak_full.zip & googleak.zip.

Run 'full' first then the other (upgrade).