Garmin Montana 680
 

Hi all!

I'm looking to buy a Garmin Montana 680 GPS, but I'm a bit confused about how the maps are installed. I've only used the typical car GPS units with the city navigation maps pre-installed. Can we download several different maps in the 680 or do you have to change out the SD cards depending on where you are going? I would like to avoid changing out cards whilst alternating between cities and off-road trails.

Thanks,

Download Garmin .IMG maps from various places and you can place them all on a single SD card in the Garmin folder, as long as it's large enough. You can give each .IMG file a unique name. You can enable and disable maps through the 680 setup app to suit your purpose. And each profile (hiking, automotive, geocaching, etc.) will remember what maps you have enabled for each, so it's just a matter of switching profiles based on your activity.

Caution:
If you purchased a Garmin map on an SD card ... be carefull that you don't overwrite the original map on the card! Garmin will not undo your destruction of the data.
I would recommend using a blank card untill you are very confident with things.

I highly recommend the free mapping from openstreetmap.nl

I've had turn by turn detailed navigation in 20 countries including Nepal, India, Thailand and Europe.

Reading over all your comments, I gather that all I need to purchase is the GPS unit and then I can download the specific maps that I need. Thanks for the information. This clears things up for me.
Much appreciated

If your previous experience is with regular car or simple bike GPS, please be patient with the Garmin Montana. It has many ways to set it up, many ways to use it and is more complex for this reason. However the joy is that you can customise its set up to your hearts content.

There are some very detailed threads on this GPS in the navigation section, to help you.

If a Garmin GPS then free maps are available. And I would suggest one that is capable of installing a memory card (microSD looks to be typical) and installing a new blank one. Then read through first and last pages of http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...eet-maps-64135 to see what one website offers.

I took the plunge with the Montana 610 ... same as the 680 without the camera. Now all I need is time to fiddle around with it.
To everyone, thanks for your comments and recommendations. :thumbup1: