raster maps in garmin 62s

[danasu]

I have garmin 62s and have raster map for  year 2010 for a Harriman state park.
I  have created this as a KMZ file with google earth and have it in  my custommap folder.
I also have a map with trails and roads from 1890 and want to save it to my gps. It also is in a KMZ file. If I put it in custommmaps, since they are in same location as 2010 map I fear that it will overwrite  2010 map. Is there any way I can save two different maps for same park, and toggle beetween them? many thanks, dave s

[maps4gps]

If you give the .kmz file a different name, they both should be usable - assuming the total tiles are less than 100.  However, I do not think there is a way to 'disable' an individual .kmz file.  Since they both cover the same area, I suspect one will display over/after the other.  Try it and let use know. 

[danasu]

this doesn't work..I get newest installed map of area  sshowing up. Can I put my 1890 map on the gps hard drive and that way I can toggle bewteen micro chip and hard drive file. I tried to create "custommap2" file but it didn't work. with magellan one can toggle beween  any saved raster map. garmin lumps them together..no good. again, many thanks. newbie dave

[Boyd]

Yes, this is a limitation of Garmin's format and there has been a lot of discussion of it on Garmin's own forum. There are a couple threads there calling for Garmin to eliminate the restrictions. Initially, one of the developers said they were looking into this. Twice now I've posted, asking for an update but they are silent. Most of us have assumed that these limitations are a marketing and not a technical issue.

But the bottom line is that you will need to have separate memory cards with the different maps and switch between them. However, you might consider making traditional Garmin maps from your source data, since they are easily toggled. Is it something that would only work with a scanned image, or something that you could trace over?

Recently I've been doing some things with Mapwel, which I purchased a few years ago but didn't use much. It's an impressive program and you can use it for free on your computer to see if it will work for you. It can vectorize a raster image, but that's sort of a kludge. The trace tool is pretty impressive and might work well for what you describe. Or you could just use the original map as a background and hand-draw lines on top of it. See: http://mapwel.eu/

[Boyd]

FWIW, post your vote for larger and more versatile custom maps here. I doubt that it will make any difference, but it can't hurt. https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=10396

This is the post from the developer that gave us some hope, but there has been no follow up.

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

[Boyd]

Yeah. And they could also provide us with official Garmin tools to create vector based maps. But they don't. I can understand all this; they're a business and map sales are an important part of their model.

We can only hope that another "Stan" comes along to figure out ways around the system. 

[Indrid Cold]

FWIW, post your vote for larger and more versatile custom maps here. I doubt that it will make any difference, but it can't hurt. https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=10396

FWIW, that forum is used by the computer software developers (MapSource, BaseCamp, RoadTrip, ...) not the GPS unit firmware/software developers. They really have no control on how the GPS units behave, just the computer software.

[Boyd]

Seems odd to revive this old thread....

Yes, I am aware of the purpose of Garmin's forums. However, look at the post I quoted above from "trailtech". He is one of the Garmin developers and he said "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."

That sounds like the developers are in fact involved with the issue of custom map limitations. But maybe he was speaking out of turn?