Glimmer of hope for bigger "custom maps"?

[Boyd]

This just appeared on Garmin's support site. I'm surprised to see that they are actually considering relaxing the size restrictions on "custom map" (raster image) format.

https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=10396

We are excited about the continued interest and adoption of Garmin Custom Maps by Garmin customers.  We are evaluating the performance impact of increasing the maximum tile size and overall tile count.  If these improvements can be achieved, our limits may be raised.  However, structural differences in the file format between Garmin Custom Maps (KMZ) and Garmin BirdsEye (JNX) will prevent Custom Maps limits to ever reach the overall capacity of Garmin BirdsEye.



Thanks,

TrailTech

[maps4gps]

They could provide a utility program to conver from .kmz to .jnx.

[Boyd]

Yeah, it would be nice if we could make our own .jnx files. Doesn't sound like they're interested however. The .jnx files obviously use a form of copy protection (locking).

[leszekp]

I'd be happy if they just gave you the option of enabling/disabling custom overlay files. This should be trivial to do - just move a disabled file into a separate directory that isn't accessed by the OS when it looks for custom overlays.

[Boyd]

Well Garmin has now increased the tile limit for custom maps to 500.... but you will need to buy a new Montana to do it (you know you want one anyway   )

https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=20653

Garmin Montana supports 500 custom map images

Many of you have requested the ability to load more than 100 jpeg of Garmin Custom Maps onto your GPSes. We were able to increase this limit to 500 on the new Garmin Montana. If you're a heavy user of Custom Map, you might want to check it out.

As always, this affects the total number of jpegs inside all the kmz files. The number of kmz file doesn't matter.

There's a big thread about the Montana with lots of reports from early adopters at Groundspeak. It is getting rave reviews from seasoned users - sounds really nice (but expensive). They say it is much faster than the Oregon or 62s, so maybe that's why they are only support this on the Montana?