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#1

General Discussion / Re: Satellite Imagery for Garm...

Last post by Boyd - September 11, 2024, 12:32:39 PM

The answer is not good (I have an old Montana 600 myself). It used to be that you could create your own Birdseye imagery with third party software, but you had to "trick" Garmin into thinking it was "real" Birdseye. This was easy to do, as long as you had an active Birdseye subscription from Garmin.

But now the problem is... you can't get a subscription from Garmin, so even if you create your own imagery you will not be able to authorize it because that depended on Garmin's servers.

You can still make Garmin "Custom Maps", which are .kmz files that can be created directly with Google Earth for small projects or with special software for somewhat larger ones. This could be a big job for someone who is not familiar with making maps however.

But - putting that aside - Garmin only supports small maps of this type, presumably because they didn't want it to compete with their own Birdseye. The Montana can accept a maximum of 600 .kmz image tiles, and each can be no larger than 1024 x 1024 pixels.

So - it depends on how high you want the resolution to be. For very high res imagery at 1 foot/pixel, each of those tiles would be 1024 x 1024 feet. A block of 5 x 5 tiles would be about equal to one square mile. Do the math... that's 25 tiles per square mile which would give you a total of 24 square miles coverage for the 600 tile limit (an area 6 miles x 4 miles, for example).

If you use lower resolution imagery, you could cover more area. But it's still very limited and only suitable for mapping small areas. The other problem is that this kind of map performs very slowly on the gps.

You will find some existing maps in this format here at GPSfileDepot, but not a lot. Go to the map page here and check the box at the top that says "Garmin Custom" then click the Filter button. That will give you a list of everything available, including several of my own that I made many years ago when Garmin first introduced this kind of map.

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/state/all

Aside from that... yeah, Garmin really extended the middle finger to everyone who owns one of these expensive older devices when they discontinued Birdseye.

#2

General Discussion / Satellite Imagery for Garmin M...

Last post by Jordan5171 - September 11, 2024, 09:28:23 AM

Hello everyone. I was hoping to get some advice/help. I have a new-to-me Garmin Montana 650t handheld gps. Garmin no longer supports Birdseye imagery (their satellite imagery software) for my device. Is there another way to download satellite imagery on it? If not, it's really of no use to me. Thanks in advance.

#3

General Discussion / Re: New Maps for Canada, US an...

Last post by sockmonkey - September 08, 2024, 07:41:01 AM

This past spring I had intended to create a map of the Philippines, either as a stand alone or combined with other countries but became sidetracked.  It is now available as a single country topo map following the link below

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/912

#4

General Discussion / Montana 600 reformatting Garmi...

Last post by Reddeer - August 29, 2024, 09:32:18 AM

Since Garmin no longer supports Montana 600 GPS,Is there away to download inland lake maps to the Montana 600?
The Garmin north America coastal maps bluechart G2 HXUSO39R doesn't have inland lakes. so 2nd part of my question is are there any inland maps for lakes that can de download or reformatted to work on a Montana 600? Peter

#5

Using The Maps/Garmin Software / Re: Are all downloads broken h...

Last post by Boyd - August 05, 2024, 01:08:26 PM

Select Copy Link

Open new tab

Paste into the address bar of new tab

Cool - that works!    I had tried just right-clicking the "here" link but that didn't work. However, copying/pasting into the address bar does work.

[858]

#6

Using The Maps/Garmin Software / Re: Are all downloads broken h...

Last post by sockmonkey - August 05, 2024, 11:44:51 AM

I should of added you should see this in the address bar except the number will change.  These are in order of uploaded maps.  You could also sub id= to the map you are trying to download

https://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/download.php?map_id=858&mac=yes

[Right]

#7

Using The Maps/Garmin Software / Re: Are all downloads broken h...

Last post by sockmonkey - August 05, 2024, 11:37:08 AM

Right click here on the screen that appears something something 3 seconds after you click on link

Select Copy Link

Open new tab

Paste into the address bar of new tab, enter, download dialog will appear

Enjoy the map!

This is Chrome or Chrome derivatives that will have this problem, not just here but other sites old and new.

#8

Using The Maps/Garmin Software / Re: Are all downloads broken h...

Last post by Boyd - August 04, 2024, 08:18:38 AM

Yeah, I can't get it to work with Chrome either. Sorry, I have no control over such things, I'm just a moderator for the forums. The site owner would have fix that and unfortunately he's not around much.

You could post about it here, but realistically, I'd just use Safari since it works and it's not likely that the site will be updated anytime soon.

https://forums.gpsfiledepot.com/index.php/board,3.0.html

#9

Using The Maps/Garmin Software / Re: Are all downloads broken h...

Last post by PaulHeckbert - August 04, 2024, 04:09:20 AM

Using Mac and Chrome 127.0.6533.89, download from gpsfiledepot does nothing (no error message, just no-op). But Safari worked. Thanks.

Suggestion: make gpsfiledepot work more reliably with Chrome. I see that others have had similar problems in the past: https://forums.gpsfiledepot.com/index.php?topic=4923.0

#10

General Discussion / Re: unable to get mapsettoolki...

Last post by Morelor - July 31, 2024, 09:18:13 PM

jmgreene - Did you ever find a working link to download it? The wayback machine links were dead as well.