Managing maps on Legend HCx

[Mastiff]

Just got a Legend HCx.  I have a 4GB memory card to go with it.  I'm disbelieving how painful it seems to be to find good maps and manage them.  With a 4 gig card, my dream was that I'd just get topos for practically the whole US, or at least the southwest and just be done with it.  I got the Arizona topo from this site and loaded it onto the card, it's working, but I'm finding that the topos are nearly worthless for road navigation since the names of streets and cities don't clearly show up.  So I figured I'd just go back to the cheesy basemap for driving, but unless I'm misunderstanding, I need to uncheck about 30 individual tiles to make the topo go away?  Is that right?

If I paid Garmin for the topo and streets maps, would I have to micromanage them at the tile level like this, or could I just go between topo and street mode?  I'm not a hiker, I wanted to use this thing for driving on Jeep trails, and you can cover a fair bit of ground.  Thanks for any help.

[maps4gps]

I believe that unit works the same as the 76/60s.  When on the map setup - information page (the list of all the individual quads) press menu - the new page has options to hide or show entire mapsets.

[Jimbob]

If you wish a free road map only, try the one on this site. As maps4gps says you can easily switch between your basemap and the topo. If you don't like the topo, it will be removed when you load another map in to the GPSr.

[Mastiff]

Thanks for the help.  I was able to enable and disable the whole ibycusUSA.  I never would have figured that out myself.  Is it possible to have multiple mapsets on a card from mapsource, for example a topo and a street map?  It looks like mapsource wants to wipe the card each time it writes.

By the way, should the Legend be able to locate street addresses with the right mapset loaded?  I know it's not marketed as a car navigator, but it would still come in handy sometimes.  With the ibycus USA street map, I haven't found a way to go more detailed than city level.

[maps4gps]

Your can have quads from multiple mapsets; however on that unit they all have to be in a single gmapsupp.img file.  The file is created in MapSource.  See: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-load-maps-on-my-garmin-gps-unit/

Each time you wish to add (or delete) a quad or mapset, you need to have MapSource recreate the gmapsupp.img file.

I have not heard if some of the Garmin products have searchable address; I doubt if those here do.  Where available, I have included address ranges in my State maps and US Planimetric.

Ibycus was a 'straight' processing of the Census files - no address info.  BTW, it was created from 2007 Census data; most States maps are more recent with 2008 data, with the US Planimetric using the recently released 2009 data.

[Indrid Cold]

For US maps, Garmin's City Navigator and maybe their new TOPO 24K series will search by address.

[Mastiff]

Thanks.  It looks like sooner or later I'll cave and pay Garmin for their data.  I knew it was coming, but it still feels like they're sticking it to me when they show all this capability in the ads that requires $200 more to realize (topo plus street routing).