Hi folks!
I have many car GPS navigators ranging in age from 2009 to 2015. However, a hiking friend of mine had an eTrex years ago and I remember it being pretty useful for hiking trails (unlike the car-based units that do turn-by-turn road-based navigation to a street address).
Anyway, I saw a Garmin eTrex Venture HC at a yard sale today and bought it. It seems to work fine, but I wanted to add more detailed maps of the area. A little googling lead me here, and since I live in NY, I downloaded this NY Topo map: www gpsfiledepot com/maps/view/111/download/
It came as an .exe which installed a .TYP and bunch of .IMG files in "C:\Program Files (x86)\nytopo11"
I realize this GPSr only has 24MB of memory so I anticipated having to trim the map to fit, but I only wanted some local maps for walking/hiking nearby.
I then downloaded and installed BaseCamp (latest version: 4.6.2) and tried to load the maps. Nothing comes up.
I followed the tutorial here: www gpsfiledepot com/tutorials/how-to-load-maps-on-my-garmin-gps-unit/
It basically says that the installed maps will just show up in BaseCamp/MapInstall. I follow the tutorial up to step 5 where it says all the maps on the computer will be listed. They are not.
The only thing in the map list says "No unlocked maps were found for this device."
If I click on "Manage Map Products" it lists Global Map v 2.00 and status is "Not Lockable" (Does this refer to the basemap that comes preinstalled in the GPSr or is this the map I see in BaseCamp?
The eTrex Venture HC shows up on BaseCamp just fine, and I can download data from it.
I transferred some "Tracks" from the GPSr to BaseCamp and a map pops up. I can select an area of the map and select Device...Send to Device...Send Selection to Device. But when I do that, the GPSr beeps once and the screen says "Database Error (ENTR)"
I tried File Import. That dialog box lists a bunch of file extensions (.fit, .gdb, .gpx, .jpeg, etc) but none of them were .typ or .img which leads me to think that somehow this map is not in the right format.
I tried downloading MapSource (version 6.16.3) also, based on the information in the tutorial here: www gpsfiledepot com/tutorials/how-to-load-maps-on-my-garmin-gps-unit/#mapsource
I had similar problems with MapSource, no maps show up, and the filetypes it is looking for are not .IMG nor .TYP.
Then I found these instructions www gpsfiledepot com/tutorials/how-to-load-.img-files-into-mapsource-with-mapsettoolkit/which seemed like precisely what I needed.
Unfortunately, one link was not good any more but I was able to use Archive.org to download cGPSmapper (MapSetToolkit was still available from the provided link).
I followed all those instructions, and additional files were created in C:\Program Files (x86)\nytopo11 (one each .MDX .REG, .MP and .TDB file).
However, neither MapSource nor BaseCamp see these maps or recognize these file types.
I also spent some time reading through the pinned threads in this forum, most of the information there pointed to the links I mentioned above.
Any help you can provide to direct me to what I am doing wrong would be appreciated! ;D
First, you are missing an important concept. You don't "open" or "import" maps in Mapsource or Basecamp. That .exe program was an installer, it should have placed everything where it belonged. When you start Mapsource, the map should then appear in the dropdown menu, as shown in step 2 here: https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-open-maps-in-mapsource/
You should NOT be using the tutorial for loading .img files into Mapsource. That is something for people who make maps, not regular users.
I would use Mapsource and not Basecamp with your eTrex, that is the software it was designed for. If the map is not showing up in the dropdown menu, there may be a problem with it. Unfortunately, many authors used an installer template that broke under Windows 7 64 bit, and most of those maps were never fixed. The installer did not create all the registry keys needed by new versions of Windows.
The kludge to fix this is to install another map that has a proper installer. After doing that, the registry keys will be there and these old broken maps should work. So quit Mapsource if it's running and try installing this map. You don't need to "use" the map, just install it and see if it fixes your problem: https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/53/
If that doesn't help, and if the NY topo is still not showing in the dropdown menu then something else is wrong with the installation or the map. There are some other old maps that break under the newest version(s) of Windows because they are installed in a location that Garmin's software can't find.
Let us know what happens, and also tell us what version of Windows you're running.
Hi Boyd!
Thanks for the response. Yes- it was the 64 vs 32 bit problem. I was looking around on other websites last night and stumbled across this link:
forums groundspeak com/GC/index.php?showtopic=321112
Which mentioned the same issue. I went back to the page for the NY topo map and reread it and sure enough in red letters there was a warning about that issue which I had ignored.
I followed the link for the new installer (probably the same one you reference) and it worked, then the NY Topo map worked too!
Followup question: I used the 'backup' function but it didn't take very long. Does that only pull down saved tracks and waypoints or does it actually backup the basemap?
When installing the NY Topo map(s) the installer actually says something about removing or deleting the existing maps. Is there a way to get the existing map back? Is it on my computer or would MapSource/BaseCamp have to download it from Garmin?
I don't know what "the backup function" is. What software are you using?
Old devices like yours will only recognize one map file - gmapsupp.img. Newer models will recognize all files with an .img extension. But when you use Mapsource, it always creates a file named gmapsupp.img and therefore deletes the previous one. So you should back it up if you want to use the other map again. You could also use multiple cards.
But there is still a way to load multiple maps on your GPS, see this tutorial and note step 8 that tells you to repeat steps 2-7 for each map you want to send.
https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-load-maps-on-my-garmin-gps-unit/#mapsource
Of course, the tiny memory in your device doesn't let you take much advantage of multiple maps. ;)
On your device, the basemap is not user-accessible. It's burned into the ROM and you can't accidentally delete it. IIRC, Garmin introduced new basemaps at some point in history, and they used a special installer to put them into protected memory. Not certain, but it might actually be bundled with the unit's firmware. Regardless, you don't need to back up the basemap.
But if there was some other Garmin map on the GPS when you bought it, it would have been a gmapsupp.img file on a card. You could simply copy that to your computer if you want a backup.
Also, with these old devices, tracks, routes and waypoint are not stored in user-accessible memory like the new models. To read/write them, special software is used that "talks" to your GPS using Garmin's protocol. Depending on what you are doing, the computer program might say "hi" to the GPS, then ask "do you have any waypoints?" an so forth. This protocol is used by Mapsource and Basecamp, but was well documented so there are a number of third party programs that can also do the same things. Garmin stopped using this system many years ago though, it's really a relic from the days of RS-232 serial interfaces. :)