Garmin Handheld Owners Benefit from Downloadable Maps
May.11, 2009 in
Garmin Colorado, Garmin eTrex, Garmin Oregon, GPSMAP 60CSx
Last week Garmin announced that much of its map data would be made available to purchase online. The press release was centered around Garmin’s new cityXplorer product which provides Nuvi 1xxx owner’s with pedestrian and public transportation navigation along with support for traditional auto navigation and POIs. When I saw this announcement I didn’t pay much attention since it seemed like there wasn’t much here for handheld users. But after searching Garmin’s site to see what was available on the Oregon and Colorado I have found some benefits for the owners of these units.
- Any Topo map that was available on microSD card format is now available as a download for the same price. That means if you are traveling to Washington state and want the latest Garmin 1:24k topographic maps you can download the US Topo 24k Northwest region for $99.
- Unfortunately cityXplorer’s support for pedestrian and public transportation navigation is not available on either the Oregon or Colorado but the auto navigation features of these maps are — think of them as little chunks of City Navigator NT 2010.10. That means if you are traveling to New York City for the weekend and want to use your Oregon to auto navigate you can download the maps for $10 without having to purchase maps for all of North America. If you’ve never used the auto navigation features of your handheld Garmin GPS this is also a great way to try them out without investing $80 in City Nav, assuming you live in or around one of the areas covered by cityXplorer.
- Traveling outside the US? Same deal, Garmin has cityXplorer for many European cities and topographic maps for Canada, Great Britain and Australia available for download.
- I also noticed some new formats available for download which haven’t been previously released on DVD or microSD, in particular City Navigator NT for the lower 49 US states and Puerto Rico ($59) which is good way to save a few bucks if you don’t need maps for Canada (which also has its own set of City Nav maps for $59) and Alaska.
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May 13th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Interesting… I assume it’s going to generate license codes like the full Topo and City Nav NT products for the device rather than attempting to create a map locked to a card.
This being the case it will be great for somebody to confirm that they install into MapSource and can be combined with other maps.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
I purchased one of the CityXplorer maps to try on my Oregon and the download was direct to my Oregon (gmapsupp.img) and it seems to have an unlock file (gmapsupp.unl) associated with it. I moved the pair of files onto my SD card and it worked fine there as well so I’m guessing it is locked to my Oregon.
No option that I can see to download the maps into Mapsource unfortunately. But this was a cheap way to get updated maps (2010.10) in the area where I live around Boston.
-Scott
July 28th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Now that the “anyfilename”.img feature has been added in the 3.01 beta firmware for the Oregon series, does anyone know if a downloaded CityXplorer map can be renamed? And I assume the associated .unl filename would need to be renamed as well?
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
I find the web presentation for the downloads quite puzzling. When it finds that there is not enough space on the Garmin, clicking the options button shows three different locations:
Oregon 550t The device with insufficient space
Removable disk B: 273738MB available
Removable disk G:3772MB available
Removable disk w: 10024MB available
Does anyone have any idea what these disks are? I do have a 4G microSD card in the
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Sounds like G is your SD card. Which drive has insufficient space (F:)?
-Scott