Maps On Gps Units

[Yellow Dog]

I'll be buying a unit soon and am leaning towards a Gpsmap 60C or 60CS.

I live in upstate New York, and occasionally take road trips South (Florida, South Carolina, etc.)

 

My Questions Are:

 

1.How much space do the maps take-up?(city maps)

 

2. Can I load enough maps into a 60C (56mb) to take a 900mi road trip?

 

3. If not, How much memory would I need?

 

My main use will be caching & hiking, so the road trip use would just be a bonus.

 

Thanks in advance for the help.

[+Les Nomades]

I just made a test and with the 60C, its seems you can put the state of NY entirely. For your travels, you transfer the maps you need for the route you'll be travelling but with City Select you can put a lot of maps in the 56 megs. Different map sections take different space on the GPS.

Edited December 30, 2005 by Nomade

[+Timpat]

I also live in upstate NY and primarlily use my 60C, which I love. I swear by my City Select and US Topo mapping. I load huge areas of Topo along with specific areas of CS to have the best of both worlds. This way I can auto-route using CS in areas I don't know well, then toggle over to Topo to hike or cache. I have virtually all of NY, VT, and eastern MA topo loaded and some detailed CS as I need it. In your road trip example, you could load topo mapping along a route from Albany to Miami, or pick areas of interest and skip sections that you would just be passing thru, and add CS maps for auto-routing in unknown city areas and be within the max available memory.

 

If you want to wait a few more weeks to make a purchase, it's still considered rumor until Jan 5-8th, Garmin is expected to be announcing the new Map 60CX (and other X units) that will have removable micro-memory cards called TransFlash. The details are still unknown but it should enable having expandable map memory (128MB) for such trips. Look for the announcement soon...I hope!

[Spinny]

For what it's worth, I just plotted a test route from Syracuse, NY to Miami, FL and had MapSource 6.9.1 select the maps along the route. The total came to 43 maps, 71.5MB of memory's worth.

[Yellow Dog]

Thanks for all the info.

I guess I'll wait a few weeks and see what the spec & price is on the 60cx & 60csx.

It might be worth waiting for the extra memory.

Edited December 30, 2005 by Yellow Dog4

[+Timpat]

For what it's worth, I just plotted a test route from Syracuse, NY to Miami, FL and had MapSource 6.9.1 select the maps along the route.  The total came to 43 maps, 71.5MB of memory's worth.

Yes, that is what I get when selecting City Select map "chunks", but when selecting Topo map chunks, you would load about 88 maps (the route I chose from Syr to Miami) for 22 MB for example. This way you can have very nice topo all the way, and still have plenty of room (+/- 30 MB) for CS where you really need it. Cool stuff!

[+Sputnik 57]

Don't sell the 60C short. You don't have to load contiguous maps to get it to autoroute. For example, you could load Syracuse, Alexadria, Raleigh, Jacksonville and Miami (or anyplace else you think you might stray from the main highway). The 60C will route along the basemap, which has the freeways you are likely to be traveling on, for any area you don't have detailed maps.

 

Just load maps for areas where you are likely to stop for a meal or a hotel, and you are set. My bet is that is that this would be far less than 56MB. Of course, once you get those areas loaded, you can keep adding maps until you get to 56MB.

Edited December 30, 2005 by Sputnik 57

[Yellow Dog]

Good to know,

Maybe I'll stick with the 60c and wait to see if the price drops when the new models come out.

[stevesisti]

Don't sell the 60C short. You don't have to load contiguous maps to get it to autoroute. For example, you could load Syracuse, Alexadria, Raleigh, Jacksonville and Miami (or anyplace else you think you might stray from the main highway). The 60C will route along the basemap, which has the freeways you are likely to be traveling on, for any area you don't have detailed maps.

 

Just load maps for areas where you are likely to stop for a meal or a hotel, and you are set. My bet is that is that this would be far less than 56MB. Of course, once you get those areas loaded, you can keep adding maps until you get to 56MB.

I'm going to diasagree with you here......autorouting is horrible using the basemap. Whether or not you need "autorouting" for a long drive, all being on one road is another question. I live in the northeast, and for three weeks before I got City Select, I used the autorouting with just the basemap....I'm not just talking about the lack of secondary roads, I mean the autorouting on included roads on the base map highways was horrible. Sure it shows you traveling down the road, but if you're counting on it to relliably tell you when to turn from one road to the next, it just doesn't work.

 

You certainly can work around this by loading just the map sections where you plane to stop or exit along the way, but I wouldn't rely on the base map in those situations.