Seeking advice please - map of Europe for Garmin GPSr

General talk
1

Hello,

I’m heading off to Europe shortly and I’d like to take my handheld GPS with me. Specifically, I’d like the ability to search for streets in countries like Germany, Hungary and Italy, as well as see and search for Points of Interest.

I have 512MB of space on my Garmin HCx Vista.

‘Search’ is really important I think.

I’ve played around with a couple of the maps from here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download
namely ComputerTeddy’s Europe and Petzlux’s derivative map.

I’ve noticed a few things:

  • Petzlux’s map is much smaller in filesize than the one I can create from ComputerTeddy’s files.
  • ComputerTeddy’s places are named in German I think?
  • I cannot seem to search for addresses in ComputerTeddy’s map. I haven’t tried Petzlux’s map yet.

As my time is currently quite limited (I leave very soon), what I’d like to know is what would be the best map for me to take with me?

Should I:

  • take Petzlux’s map?
  • take ComputerTeddy’s map instead?
  • create my own and somehow make it searchable?
  • add a Points of Interest db somehow?

What would your approach be? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I’ve just noticed the streets around my home are not mapped - when I get back from Europe I will see if I can map them myself and contribute back to OSM! :slight_smile:

2

You can’t search with those garmin maps. What you need are the routable one’s or create one yourself with osm2mp.pl. One for whole Europe available here http://emexes.powweb.com/osm/download.html

3

Skywave - thank you very much, that’s the info I was looking for.

Do you know if a good POI database I can use? I don’t mind ‘compiling’ one myself for the areas I’m visiting if I can find a larger source.

4

Skywave - I downloaded the Europe map from that site. Unfortunately the zip file was corrupted. I was going to download it again in case the problem was with my download, but in the end I grabbed the single country .img files for each country I am visiting. I used sendmap20 to join them together into one gmapsupp.img file.

I now have the full selection of ‘search’ options available - and menus for ‘lodging’ and ‘all poi’ appear to have valid entries. However the ‘Addresses’ search does not work - there are no results for any search strings I specify in the ‘region’, ‘city’, ‘street’ or ‘street number’ fields. No matter what I input, it returns ‘no matches found’.

Do you think I’d have more success if I tried to build the maps myself, somehow?

EDIT - I’ve just discovered that the Germany map is also a corrupted zip file :frowning:

5

I am not the creator of these maps, but you could try the email address on the bottom of the page.
I guess the region/city thing doesn’t work because OSM has no good data available to match streets/pois to cities other then choosing the nearest place node.

6

Word on the mailinglists is that - when using a proper download application - the routable Garmin maps in ZIP format are working ok.

So DownThemAll, wget etc. should work.