Garmin is probably the best known and most popular GPS satellite navigator present in cars in the world and, I believe, also in Italy. The Garmin navigator allows you to always know which way to go to a place with the car, always providing the shortest or fastest way.
When you go to update the official maps from the Garmin site you find out bitterly that you have to pay about 60 Euros so, in this post, we see how to create custom maps using Google Maps or Bing Maps or how to download the maps of Open Street Maps, free, updated and free .
The Windows application that allows you to save Google and Bing maps on your computer so that you can import them into any model of Garmin GPS Navigator is OpenStreetMaps .
This free site allows you to download customized maps by choosing the portion of the world.
Alternatively, an old program called Google Trail allows you to create maps for Garmin GPS. The provider of the displayed map is visible in the upper right corner and you can change it by choosing Google Maps instead of Bing or other. You can also choose the type of map to be displayed between the satellite view, normal or hybrid. There are controls to change the zoom level which can still be moved by the mouse wheel.
Always with the mouse you can move the map. An interesting possibility of GoogleTrail is the possibility of adding maps from other sites besides the one chosen, from the drop-down menu on the right, Overlays. You can practically save the map by merging Bing Maps and Google Maps together .
By clicking on the " View " menu you can select Custom Maps and make the controls appear to save the map on your computer and import it on the Garmin .
- Press on Draw Area ;
- Select the area to be saved with the mouse (without exaggerating);
- Press Select Current Zoom and then First Tile ;
- Zoom in a bit and press Select Current View again ;
- Repeat the Select for the various zoom levels desired (do not overdo it);
- For the last zoom level chosen, press on Select and then on Last Tile .
- Click on Build Map to see how much space the built map occupies (if you have exaggerated, it will be one GB or more large).
- Save the mapprj file on the computer.
- From the Windows Start menu, click on the TileDownloader file.
- Choose the file created before and decide in which folder to save the images.
- Go to Generate KML and generate the KML file by giving it a name.
- Open the Kml file with Google Earth
- Right click on the Google Earth kml file and save it as a kmz file.
- Copy this kmz file in the Garmin navigator to the location " / Garmin / CustomMaps / ".
If you find it difficult, there is an alternative program that allows you to save Google O Bing maps for use on your computer offline or on some mobile applications, for Garmin or for other satellite navigators.
This program is Mobile Atlas Creator which also works to create maps to be viewed on the computer via OziExplorer .
In another article I had written on Locus, an application for Android capable of saving maps to see the streets offline on the phone.
To do it first, there are also Open Street Maps (OSM) for Garmin to download for free by choosing the preferred one on this page.
They are free maps so there is no vyration of copyrght, they are always updated and free maps, consisting of a file to be copied to the SD card (in which a folder named Garmin must be created).
The downloads of the files are compressed so you can download a gz or tar file that must be extracted using the 7zip program.
For each map you get a file called gmapsupp.img which must be copied to the Garmin folder of the SD card.
On the Garmin, in the settings, you can choose to use the OSM map.
The downloads of the Central Europe map with Italy is on the NavMaps.eu website.
