A NEW WAY OF FINDING YOUR WAY.

Byline: Jim Matthews Special to the Daily News

You are driving out in the Mojave Desert looking for a desert stock tank someone said was great for bird hunting.

Or maybe you are on a steep trail in the Sierra, trying to find a series of beaver ponds just teeming with big brook trout.

Need a map? How about the map of the future?

It will be a small video screen, either on the dashboard or in a hand-held unit, showing your location as a blinking spot on a topographic map. Then it will give you a bearing and distance to your goal, which shows as a flag or some similar symbol. You also will be able to see a profile of the terrain between you and your destination.

The melding of Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment and computer-mapping software is already available (and in use in some rental-car companies). They can chart street routes through practically every city in America, and the small step to combining GPS with digitized U.S. Geological Survey quad maps is just a year or two from commercial sales.

If you are willing to drive or hike with a laptop computer and a GPS device, you already can plot your every movement across just about any piece of ground in the nation.

While this might seem like a bit much to the hunter or fishermen or hiker who's probably trying to get away from the television and technology that surround us daily, the digitized maps and mapping software offer computer users an opportunity to print out customized maps.

Here are some of the electronic map products available:

TOPO! Interactive Maps on CD-ROM (Wildflower Productions) are the most expensive of the sets available, but the software offers the most features, including printing out an elevation profile of the route you intend to - or have - hiked. TOPO! has a Southern California set and two Sierra Nevada sets. All of its 7.5-minute series quadrangle map sets are seamless, meaning you can scan and print across the borders without seeing the margins. Each set costs about $70 and has some 80 USGS quads.

Timberline (Timberline Maps) has fewer software features, but it's resolution level is higher for the quads and the two-CD set has 510 maps from throughout California. Cost for the set is about $55.

Outdoors on Disk (3D Labs) has map sets for a variety of areas in California, but they aren't seamless. Each set consists of about 200 maps digitized and the cost is $30.

Teale Data Center is scanning for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other government and private agencies. It provides maps on CD for the price of $75 per 24 maps. No software is provided, but the individual maps are saved as TIFF files and can be called up on most mapping and graphics software, like Photoshop.

USGS DRGs from the Earth Science Information Center are the electronic versions of the maps you can buy in stores. The sale of these CDs was on hold until recently, but they are available again. Maps of the entire country eventually will be available on CD, sold in one-degree cells and containing all 64 of the 7.5-minute maps in that block. Cost is $32 per CD or $42 for two-CD set. As with Teale maps, you need additional software to view these TIFF files.