I will be South Korea in the next month and am looking for some maps for my GPS (Garmin Montana 650).

I am chasing some mapping recomendations.

Are the Open Street Maps or Garmin Maps better in people's experience?

Do you need a firmware upgrade to support Korean script with Garmin maps like do you for Cyrillic when using RoR?

Are Korean road signs in Latin script or Korean only? (I am assuming the later at this stage). I can do Cyrilic to Latin and vis versa on fly most of the time, but I think I would struggle with any of the Alphabets from that part of Asia.

90% of the signs have English dubbing.
OSM have Korean script. No firmware upgrade needed.
Suggest you read Riding Pointers in Korea.. On this board. I will be in Korea before 10th of Aug.

Thanks I have run through most it and will do a refresher before we arrive.

We will arrive on Aug 25 from Vlad. I would love to catch up and get an idea of what to see. I quite uneducated on this part of the world.

Is OSMs coverage good enough?

Hi there,

I live in Korea and I am an OSM contributor. I see that you probably arrived yesterday, but I hope I can still give you some useful information.

I can't answer your question about using OSM data on your specific GPS, but I guess by now you will have tried it out.

In Korea, most roadsigns (destinations and street names) are written in Korean and English. Some of the instructional signs (warnings or restrictions) are Korean only, but it should be obvious from context what they are trying to tell you. Oh, and the motorways (red/blue shield) are toll roads. The 'national roads' (blue oval) are a high-grade, free alternative in most areas.

Regarding coverage, it's not too bad. OSM Korea is mostly routable, and most of the major roads are present and connected. Some of the smaller roads are not present. Also, as you will see, there is a significant amount of road construction happening all over the country, with some roads being upgraded or re-routed, and new roads being added. It's tricky for OSM volunteers to keep on top of this, but every day the map gets better.

There aren't too many POIs in the database, and some of them may be out of date. Also, Korea changed its street address system a couple of years ago. OSM Korea does not have many old-style or new-style addresses yet, so you may only be able to search using POI name.

If you *do* use OSM data during your trip I'd be very keen to hear your opinion of the coverage and accuracy (good, bad, or mixed), which I can pass on to the Korean OSM community.

Have an enjoyable time in Korea!

Andrew

Unfortunately my bike died in Russia and is staying here for good. So I wont be using OSM or anything else in Korea.

Oh dear. I am very sorry to hear that. Good luck with whatever you do next.

Hi Andrew

We're in Korea (Andong) at the moment and we are using OSM on our Garmin Montana. It's definitely better than the Garmin maps we arrived with. As you say, there is a lot of road construction going on but we've had no problems with it so far. Until they stop making new roads, there will always be routing issues but nothing serious.

We're here until the end of next week so will let you know if we come up against any major problems with it.

We've used OSM for our trip to Africa and again since we left the UK on this trip so a big thanks to all the contributors of OSM for making our journey so far an awful lot easier

Debz

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www.sidecar-vagabonds.blogspot.com

9 years later but should be useful for others:

The Garmin units sold in Europe and North America DO NOT support Oriental maps.

You must buy a DIFFERENT hand set for Japan and a DIFFERENT handset for Korea. It may be possible to fit Korean on the Japanese model or Japanese on the Korean model but it would not be a trivial exercise. You certainly CANNOT do the same with European models as the internal memory on the Garmin is too small to support the double-byte character set.

So, for Korea, you should just download Naver Maps on your smartphone if you want to go to the mountains. If you are not interested in the mountains either Daum or Naver will do.

The Open street Maps may suffice for a holiday but they are really so far behind the pace of construction in South Korea that they are otherwise not worth considering.

I do not understand why OSM maps will not work.

I had maps from Japan in just for testing reasons and I did use OSM maps from Turkey to Mongolia and Russia in a Garmin device.
And it always worked.

In fact, I consider OSM maps as very good actually.

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www.klausmotorreise.com

I do believe Garmin GPS units are sold around the world .. and that there are no specific GPS units for any country/area.
Some GPS units have maps installed for the country they are sold in .. that does not mean the GPS itself is specific to the country, just the map!

The OSM maps from Free worldwide Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap show things in English .. which is handy for visitors who are more familiar with English particularly where local signs show English names as well as the local language (like South Korea).

International character support (sandscript, Kanji, etc) I have no knowledge of .. so I will not comment. But at least some Garmin GPSes use a microSD card .. the amount of memory is not a problem for these, implementation of international character support might be a problem.

Most maps suffer from new stuff coming along. Keeping OSM upto date relies on the local community and the infrequent visitor, and OSM is fairly good in keeping upto date where there are locals prepared to help.

Other than OSM .. amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/Japan-Korea-2.../dp/B01F1EOR7Q Note: this is in English too... and may not have more detail nor be more current than OSM.

Add.........

http://admincabal.com/osm/ has an OSM Japan map in kanji and kana. Dated 2012 for PC installer, .imj file is july 2015 (more upto date).

Nerds interested in international character support may look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/i18n

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To answer the original questions

1 Garmin map or OSM ... Garmin City Nav not available to 'us', other sources may not be that much different from OSM. I'd go with OSM. If a ginuine Garmin map were available .. it would probably have more detail, more POI .. these may not be of much value to a casual tourist.

2 Languages .. as stated above signs carry both the local language and English, so an English OSM map should not be too much of a problem. As time goes on 'we' might get GPS maps that can be switched from one language to another ... would certainly help tourists!