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Georeferenced Rasters to a Garmin Colorado


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Yeah, this might be a dumb question, but I'm new to handheld GPS units and I can't figure it out. How do I get a raster image onto my Colorado and use it as a basemap?

 

I have access to lots of great data from work along with licenses for ArcMap and Autocad Civil3d and I'm quite fluent in those so I was hoping to be able to create my own custom maps to use on the Garmin. I can export about any format including Geotiffs, Sids, ECW's, etc.

 

Unfortunately, I've found the Garmin documentation to be rather poor at best though the unit itself seems quite nice.

 

Thanks!

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You can't.

 

The units don't accept raster maps.

Umm... You might add "...yet" because the 400i and 400c use satellite imagery as their basemap, so there is strong speculation that the Colorados will eventually support raster maps.

 

Thanks for the replies everybody. Yeah I guess I got confused about that. I have a 400t and was sure I'd read somewhere about adding rasters to it, but I guess I was reading about the i or the c models instead. Hopefully in the future it'll work since I'm lucky enough to have Arcmap.

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tn_3DTQ.jpg
While very impressive, these do dramatically point to the biggest drawback of all raster maps:

 

They pixelate terribly as you zoom in, while vector maps do show the straight lines, text is not affected. Also their are no objects on a raster map, so you can't point to a contour with the cursor and get back an elevation.

 

Five years ago raster was the holy grail for me, but now that I've seen how good a vector map can be, I've come full circle, particularily for Topos. Satellite and photos are of course another story. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

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Colorado 400i seems to have up to 3 sets of satellite images that are digitally scaled.

 

The good news is that it appears the Colorado CAN do vector map overlays on top of bitmap aerial images. The bad news is that Garmin has not fully implemented the data.

 

They appear to have a satellite image at 500 miles that they digitally zoom to about 80 miles, then another satellite image set at 50 miles that is zoomed to 5 miles, another photo partial image set at 3 miles that they can zoom down to 0.3 miles. The road information and shaded relief information also seems to only partially cover areas at 3 miles and closer, with major data gaps showing up.

 

You can check out some pics here:

 

ZoomPhotos:

http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=188151

 

Kinda nifty, but I’m still waiting on drag-and-drop Google maps :)

 

Whichever route you take, have a Gr808! –CrazyViking

 

Yeah, this might be a dumb question, but I'm new to handheld GPS units and I can't figure it out. How do I get a raster image onto my Colorado and use it as a basemap?

 

I have access to lots of great data from work along with licenses for ArcMap and Autocad Civil3d and I'm quite fluent in those so I was hoping to be able to create my own custom maps to use on the Garmin. I can export about any format including Geotiffs, Sids, ECW's, etc.

 

Unfortunately, I've found the Garmin documentation to be rather poor at best though the unit itself seems quite nice.

 

Thanks!

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As for the Delorme unit, I've already bought a Colorado and don't plan on taking it back (knock on wood).

 

I understand the limits of rasters, but I have access to sub-meter imagery in many areas (read large urban areas. Not so much in the boondocks :D) so I don't think pixelation will be much of a problem. Mainly my goal is to overlay a raster on areas where I'll be Geocaching or being a tourist.

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I have a question about putting imagery on the PN-20. When you process your MrSID (or whatever format) imagery in XMap and send it to the PN-20, will that imagery display with good resolution at all scales? Or is it one of those lame things I've seen where you have to say which scale you plan on using for viewing the imagery, and if you happen to view at a larger scale, the image is all pixelated. For example, if the image was processed to be viewed optimally at 1:10000 and you zoomed in to 1:2400, would it just be a bunch of big pixels? Or would you be able to take advantage of the actual resolution of the original image? I have several gigs of aerial imagery that I use for work and would love to have it on hand while caching. My eXplorist 400 is pretty beat up, the Triton is disappointing, and the Colorado is too expensive. The PN-20 with a version of XMap for importing shapefiles looks like it would be a good companion for both caching and work.

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