Satellite Imagery for Garmin Montana 650t

[Jordan5171]

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.

[Boyd]

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.