Kudos to you for taking the time to do it by hand...most folks would have just given up!
Another option is
Delorme Topo software. I have used it for years, its very affordable and they are always improving it. One nice feature that you'd like is the ability to add notes, POIs, etc. You can also use it to see circular ranges. You can determine a center point and drag out a circular range from that point. I used it when determining ranges for the individual sites on the Colorado DTRS system for the GPS on my 996 scanner and it worked great as a visual aid.
I use the DeLorme Topo USA software as well. You can load in the lat and long from FCC data for anywhere in the country and find out the location of a repeater very quickly and the learning curve is pretty short. The amount of data that can be entered on one DVD is very limited so the DeLorme software has a lot to be desired in comparison to the National Geographic state by state USGS topo map CD's. As for POI's on the DeLorme software, I believe, and please correct me if I"m wrong, that businesses have to pay DeLorme to have themselves listed and shown on the maps. In some areas nearly every business is shown and in others maybe 5% of them are. In rural areas most are not. Google maps seem to be similar. DeLorme's Street Atlas USA seems to work frailly well in metro areas, but in rural areas it can often be useless.
A friend of mine was visiting a couple of weeks ago and showed me what Google could do in an I Phone or whatever it was. It was great looking at his new house on a satellite view and quite incredible when he was able to bring up a street level view of his house also. Then I asked him to do the same with my wife and I's condo in a not very small town of 7,600 people. The satellite view was just as blurry and large scale as what I can bring up on this computer and a street level view could not be had for the whole county, including another town in the county I had lived in previously, which at 760 people fits my definition of a small town. Then I asked him to give me a street level view of the town of 600 people in New Mexico I lived in prior to moving to California and we could not even get a blurry view of the town.
A lot of technology such as cell phones, mapping software, etc. works well in eastern states (everything east of Denver International Airport) and metro areas (towns of 50,000 or more) but doesn't work at all in small rural areas. Since more than 70% of the population lives in the east, or in metro areas, this is understandable. But those marketing claims of "nationwide coverage" by cell phone providers or FedEx's claim that "when it absolutely has to get there overnight" or some such doesn't ring true in the places I've lived in for most of my life. Many recent urban transplants and visitors are quite surprised when they first experience this.
As far as taking a compass on a paper map, the learning curve for that is much shorter than doing the same task on a computer and the result is just as good as all that high tech software. You can get the answer and still be waiting several minutes while the computer is still booting up, not to mention the time it takes to load the CD and wait for the application to boot up. The compass works very well as long as you have good paper maps on hand. All methods have good points and limitations and a computer doesn't always fill the bill.
