new with Tread overland need help

[donb]

I am new to off road gps, my friend bought a tread overland and I was impressed with how bright the screen is, I was using a samsung tablet and it was very hard to see as the screen would wash out in the Yuma AZ desert which is where we ride so I bought a Tread overland.I am unhappy that many of the trails we ride do not show up on the gps, my friend has a 24k topo southwest mapping sd card from Garmin and he is able to see the trails we ride, well most of them but not all. anyway I bought a SD card and copied his sd card, well that did not work and so I contacted garmin and ask if after spending 1300 dollars on a fancy gps do I still need to spend more money and buy their topo sd card, the answer was yes. dang. so I started searching which brought me to here.
I found a file called Arizona topo and downloaded it into my mac computer and think I have it as the map garmin explorer or base camp is showing, the problem is I am still not able to see the trails we ride. can anyone help me with what i have to do so I can see the trails we ride in and around Yuma AZ. thank you in advance for any and all help
Don

[Boyd]

Is this the map you're trying to use?

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/1/

Garmin has some instructions for installing third party maps here

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=21G3VnXffc3fvlt4Ru9Yg7

I don't have a Tread and have stopped using Garmin devices completely now, I think Garmin is living in the past and their devices are not a good value today. But that's beside the point, of course.

Anyway, that support document assumes you already have an .img file in the correct format and it simply tells you how to copy it to the GPS. The trick will be creating the .img file in the first place. You could try this: plug a USB flash drive into your Mac, not sure if it's necessary, but the first thing I would do is format it as FAT-32, which is what Garmin uses.

Open the Disk Utility app, you will find it in the Utilities folder which is inside the Applications folder on your Mac. On the left side of the window you should find a listing for your flash drive. Click on that, then click the Erase button at the top of the window. IMPORTANT - make sure you have really chosen the USB flash drive and not another disk on your Mac! Also note that you must use a flash drive and NOT a hard disk or SSD for this.

Disk Utility should then ask if you want to erase the flash drive. Click the Format menu and choose the MS-DOS (FAT) option, then click Erase.

You should now be able to use Garmin MapInstall to put the map on your USB flash drive. Garmin's software will think that your flash drive is actually a GPS and treat it accordingly. Follow our tutorial here. Note: Garmin MapInstall is part of the Basecamp software, but some people report that the App Store version doesn't include it. If you don't see this app in your Applications folder, use the link in the tutorial to download it directly from Garmin

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-load-maps-on-my-garmin-gps-unit/#mac

If all of this works, you should now have a folder named Garmin on the flash drive and there will be an .img file inside that folder which is the map.

At this point, you can use the instructions in the Garmin link I posted above to create a folder named Map on Tread GPS, then copy the .img file to it.

Sound complicated? Yeah, it is. And, getting back to your original post, apparently this map doesn't have the trails you want on it anyway. You could try installing some other maps from this site in that case.

Maybe somebody else will have some suggestions, but I wouldn't count on it. This site is pretty dead now. As a moderator, it pains me to say this, but it's mostly just spammers that post here, I delete their posts and ban them all day long.

As I've suggested to others, you might try another site such as this.

https://advrider.com/f/

But (IMO) the sun is slowly setting on Garmin's expensive, proprietary devices and forums like ours - which used to be so interesting and helpful - are all but dead. 

[donb]

WOW
great info. thank you VERY much for taking the time to help me. I will try my best to follow your instructions.

[Boyd]

Happy to help. Since you're using a Mac, you could also use a "virtual device" for this instead of a physical flash drive. See this:

https://www.javawa.nl/virtualdevice.html

On that site you will find a number of very useful free apps. They're written in Java, which makes them compatible with Macs and Windows machines. Don't recall the details, but some of them may no longer work because of changes to MacOS however, I think you'll find some discussion of that on his site.

Unfortunately, the author suffered a stroke a number of years ago. He recovered, but didn't feel mentally capable of continuing his software development. Has been awhile since I've heard anything, hope he is OK.