Comparison of different GPS maps
 

I hope someone here can point out what I'm doing wrong.

I've been comparing the following maps:

• built-in low-detail worldmap that came with my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx
• SmellyBiker's Wanderlust world maps
• openstreetmap.org maps

Unless I haven't properly activated something in MapSource (I do have maximum detail selected), or my sampling has been really unlucky, openstreetmap.org maps are of far superior quality that the rest. I wonder why HUBBers don't seem to be using them that much.

Wanderlust has a wealth of Points Of Interest (POIs), but its drawing and street mapping is not so much more advanced than the (very low detail) built-in Garmin map.

It appears that overlaying the Wanderlust POIs onto the openstreetmap.org maps would produce an excellent result (best of both worlds?)

Other than that, when it comes to mapping roads and the accuracy of the terrain, at least on the PC (I haven't loaded OSM info onto the GPS yet) openstreetmap.org looks to be clearly superior to the competition.

Attaching some images for comparison - please do let me know if I'm missing something obvious.

(the order of the images is:

1. Garmin built-in world map
2. Wanderlust world map
3. openstreetmap.org

)

Beirut

Budapest
 

Maps of Budapest

Islamabad
 

Maps of Islamabad

Ushuaia
 

Maps of Ushuaia - I was expecting this to be superb on Wanderlust since Bob appears to have spent some time there... again, I might not be doing something correctly, but it seems POIs are all that is on offer and the rendering of sea vs land is questionable...

Wanderlust v1.60 (2007) snapshots
 

Looking for an explanation, I also installed the previous version of the Wanderlust maps (v1.60), and I noticed that interestingly enough for some places there was more detail (e.g. Buenos Aires and Ushuaia are way more detailed than they appear on the v2r03 maps).

There is definitely something fishy going on - don't know if it's a software or map bug (or chair-keyboard interface :-) but I'm hoping someone will help get to the bottom of this.

Some samples from the places mentioned above follow:
1. Beirut
2. Budapest
3. Islamabad
4. Ushuaia

How do I get open street map on my GPS ( Garim) It looks Great!

George

Hi George

There are instruction on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_MapSource but I haven't had the time to try them yet.

Please post back your experiences if you do & I'll try to do the same.

Alex

Successfully uploaded OSM tiles to Garmin GPSmap 60CSx
 

Following the instructions at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_MapSource I was able to import pre-generated OpenStreetMap.org tiles into MapSource, and hence my Garmin GPS.

This pre-generated tileset is for Europe only and as I'm learning in small steps I haven't even tried generating my own maps from primary OSM data (which basically allows me to selectively create the .img tiles that I want, for any location in the world, with the latest OSM data), so the comparison with Wanderlust (the best maps I have to compare with) is from EU places only, but I have to say OSM looks very good.

I don't know how to judge the accuracy of the maps, but there does seem to be a lot of detail there. I have the feeling a combination of OSM and Wanderlust would yield really good maps!

Comparisons follow, with the Wanderlust maps first, followed by OSM:

Beirut
 

1. Wanderlust
2. OSM

Budapest
 

As seen in MapSource:

1. Wanderlust
2. OpenStreetMap

GPS Maps
 

Thanks mate, great stuff.
Will have a look through the stuff.

Claudio

Ordnance Survey maps are licenced in the UK and the costs of integrating those would be....beyond Star Trek IMHO!

Oops, sorry for the confusion, OSM = OpenStreetMap - http://www.openstreetmap.org

Free (as in freedom). The license is a pretty standard Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

So it shouldn't be a problem to both use them individually and potentially use them to enhance the Wanderlust maps!

Ah! that clears up the OSM query Alexandros-
I've emailed Bob so he can look at your suggestions- He's the wizard on building his maps- I'm more up-to-speed on the user side of GPS and building POI databases for use with POI loader!

I´m trying to install the worldmap from OSM Worldfile Mirror in mapsource, but I can´t, how could I make it?

What exactly is you doing and what's going wrong?

I use mapsettoolkit v1.62 and after loading the 18,236 OSM tiles the application has a hard time compiling one gmapsup.img - after a while it usually crashes.

If I try to send the maps "directly" to the GPS with sendmap20.exe it appears to do it, and creates a 2GB+ gmapsup.img file in the storage card of my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx, but then the device (the GPS unit) appears to be unable to render the maps, and simply ignores them.

So when it comes to the world map I'm stuck for the time being.

For a map that covers the EU (and some more...), it works fine for me by following the instructions in OSM Map On MapSource - OpenStreetMap

After you've downloaded the tiles from http://openstreetmap.teddynetz.de/latest/eu.tgz it's a matter of seconds to register them in Mapsource (using MapSetToolkit). So then it's just a matter of selecting the area you want in MapSource and clicking "send to device". Works like a charm on my Garmin, and the level of detail for relatively obscure places is excellent.

The resulting gmapsup.img to be found on the device is 600MB (see screenshots).

With this level of detail, I wonder if the GPS device will be able to cope with rendering the maps... if EU alone is 600MB, how big will the file be for a world map? Perhaps it may hit some file size limitation (the data card is formatted as FAT32, which means 4GiB is the max file size - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...systems#Limits

I will certainly post when I get the time to play around with this some more and create my own custom maps. (and I hope that if anyone in HUBB has figured this out they will share the method)

So for the time being only the pre-fab OpenStreetMap EU tiles work for me.

I read your initial post with interest as I recently managed to loose my Garmin Quest, so I am now loking to replace it. However, some models do not have great pre-loaded maps to start with and I hope to travel to places outside their remit anyway!

So I followed your links and downloaded some comtent. I tried some African map material from one site and the teddynetz EU version too.

However, I have noticed that, in my version of mapsource, the detail of the OSM map is not great. Yes, street level detail is there, but for example there is no colour differentiation between land and sea and this makes interpreting the map on my monitor a little hard, so I can only imagine how hard it will be on the eTrex Legend HCx screen if I go for that model.

Is it my mapsource or is this one of the compromises of free mapware?

With worldmap, I download it and I use mapsettoolkit v1.62 like the instructions, mapsettoolkit shows me that is installed, but I can´t see it when I open mapsource.
I don´t want to make a gmapsup.img of worldmap, but yes of same places.

Yes, I've seen this issue too - ocean tiles are not a different color which is confusing.

What other details have you found missing? (post screenshots if possible so I can double-check on my machine)

At some point I saw a thread that discussed how to make ocean tiles blue, but I didn't bookmark it... I suggest you have a go at http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=26 (the Garmin-specific OpenStreetMap forum) for any issues, since I'm also just learning about all this stuff and slightly overwhelmed!

Right, that's exactly what I want to do as well. Create a custom map with full coverage of the countries I will travel in, in full street level detail (or as much as is available, anyway).

Will let you know once I get the time to play around with this and figure out the steps.

Thanks in advance.

So far this is the only issue I have noticed. It's not such a big deal: it's more of a niggle.

After all I may not be able to tell where the land stops and sea starts on a GPS screen but if I have the same difficulty working it out when riding down the road, then I need more than GPS, I need new spectacles!!

Great find this, thankyou for posting. I followed the instructions and now have Europe on my 60CSx. Brilliant. :thumbup1:

It appears that there are ready-made colorful maps of Europe from the same user ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Computerteddy ), but apparently the poor chap has ran out of bandwidth as I can't get to any of the pre-fab maps he links to. You might want to try downloading them through the BitTorrent network - links to torrents here: http://osm.ammit.de/osm/latest/torrents/

I read some warnings that loading "pretty" maps makes rendering significantly slower on the GPS device, but haven't tried them myself (yet!)

After 3 months of usage...
 

Hi everyone

An update on the maps as I've now been using them for 3+ months now and can attest to their value. Especially these last few days in India, I've been *seriously* impressed with the level of detail - even back streets in Amritsar & the Delhi bazaar chaotic passages are mapped!

I have used the free openstreetmap.org Garmin packages provided from http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php and time after time, in Turkey, in Iran, in Pakistan and now in India they are proving excellent and easy to update with your own traces via their website.

Highly recommended! :thumbup1:

Alexandros

I am preparing for Tr, Sy, Jo, Lb trip in 2 months and I find these maps wonderful!! For this area the total of openstreet.exe is only 27 MB and install it easy in mapsource. The details in towns and POI there is very helpfull. I will try these days to send the mapset to my garmin, I hope it will work fine.

And routable? WoW:clap:

Perhaps this is worth making a sticky?
 

Perhaps this is worth making a sticky? - it certainly set me in the right direction for mapping (Thanks to Alexandros). I found this:

Worldwide routable Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap

This service gives you the following for any part of the world (from website):

• Installer for Garmin MapSource (Windows).
• Installer for Garmin RoadTrip (Mac OSX)
• Combined image for direct manual placement on the GPS device (gmapsupp.img)
• A zip file just containing all the Garmin map tiles as selected on this website. This is useful for Linux users (e.g. Qlandkarte)

Everything's free, though you are encoraged to contribute tp the mapping project.

transfer to the device without probs, the calculating in simulating mode in my garmin 278 is very fast


nice work

@seizetheday - yes from here is taken the selected part of the world

Great post and good work...

I have to agree, osm maps are great. I hadn't even heard of them before I got to Africa which was a fail on my part... They don't seem to be well advertised !! ?

Smelly biker maps are a waste of money IMHO !! There are far superior, cheaper or free maps out there.

For Africa, T4A are great but OSM are almost or just as good...

If you head to South America, go to Dakar Motos, buy a sticker and get the mapear maps from Javier..

Has anyone cracked the ocean color problem??
I have it too and have no idea what to do to change it.
Thanks
bill

Updated URL: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

"Free routable maps for Garmin brand GPS devices"

Impressed that the people providing this are not even accepting donations. I've started contributing data to OpenStreetMap and it's immensely rewarding.

Glad to help out anyone considering mapping for OSM. (I think adding/uploading Points of Interest is the easiest way to start)

It looks like a really good map programme, but to be honest I'm entirely confused as to the whole process due to the multitude of small programmes required.

Am I right in thinking that this link is all you need for downloading maps...

OSM Map On MapSource - OpenStreetMap Wiki

or

Free worldwide routable Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap

And this one is for creating your own maps / way points, etc.

https://sites.google.com/site/cypherman1/

i.e. the cGPSmapper and GmapTools.

?

Thanks,

Alex.

Depends on what exactly you want to do.

To download free maps that you can use directly on your Garmin GPS device, http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ is all you need.

Steps:

1. Select the country you want to download (let's pick Europe->United Kingdom)
2. The "Download map now!" links appears on the left of the map. Click it. This currently (1st July 2010) takes you to this directory: http://planetosm.oxilion.nl/~lambert...8520d3fdb9f18/
3. Click on osm_routable_gmapsupp.zip to download it (this file is a "Compressed file that contains a single image that can be placed directly onto the SD-card of the GPS.")
4. After the file is downloaded, decompress/open it - you get a GMAPSUPP.IMG file.
5. Connect your GPS to your computer with a USB cable.
6. Now copy the GMAPSUPP.IMG you downloaded into the "Garmin" folder of your GPS's SD card, replacing the file that's already there. (you might want to keep a backup of the original file before you replace it, just in case you need to restore the old map you used to have on your GPS)
7. Restart your GPS & enjoy the map!

To do more advanced stuff, see Bertrand's post.

-A