Why all the Birdseye hate?

[+BStheTech]

Against my better judgement I went ahead and subscribed to Garmin for Birdseye on my 62st. It took some wrangling but when

I got it to work it's awesome. I now have a choice between topographical and satellite images wherever I happen to be that day.

The picture quality was much better than I expected. I can even see my car in my driveway.

 

So far the only problem is it took awhile to get to work (typical Garmin) and I can't figure out how to store the image maps on my

8 GB SD card.

 

Comments?

 

B.

[+dfx]

Agreed. It's not the holy grail, but it's got its uses and is fairly cheap. I used it quite a bit and have found it useful and helpful many times.

[+ecanderson]

 

So far the only problem is it took awhile to get to work (typical Garmin) and I can't figure out how to store the image maps on my

8 GB SD card.

 

Comments?

 

B.

You get two choices when downloading... 1) download to PC, 2) download to PC and GPS internal memory. For some reason, Basecamp is too stupid to suggest downloading to the SD card.

 

In the long run, it's faster to NOT download to the Garmin at the same time - just download to your PC. When you're done, select the section in Basecamp and "Send to" your SD card.

[+ecanderson]

OK - as for the hate:

 

First, the early releases of Basecamp treated every stinking tile as a separate file. As a result, the Birdseye folder could easily contain tens of thousands of files, tending to bring the PC (well, the OS at any rate) to its knees. So it was badly designed, and horribly slow, a major eater of processor and disk time.

 

Next, the early Birdseye experience as limited to about 70MB of data in a defined area. It took a bazillion rectangles to cover any reasonable area. At least that's been improved some, but it can still take a bunch of rectangles to define a serious caching area.

 

Imagery is not uniformly good. There are areas where the quality is great, and areas where the quality is very poor. There are areas being distributed that are overcast with clouds, dark, or whatever other image defect you can imagine. An example are the mountains just west of the Denver/Boulder area. It's like night and day - literally. Not bad further north, but as you move south, there's a sudden demarcation where it's clear the shots were taken at a different time, and the lighting is awful and the images dark.

 

As I understand it, some people are in areas where the "highest" resolution isn't so high. I don't know how the decision for resolution is managed by the satellite mapping firms, but not all areas are taken at as high a resolution as others. Since Birdseye doesn't seem to use any low flight images (only satellite, it would appear), there's nothing to fill in the poorer resolution areas.

 

I'm sure I'm forgetting half the list - but that's part of it.

[sparksd]

One of the big issues with BirdsEye is that recently there was a problem with downloading high-res images. Where before you could could download larger areas at high-res, there was a problem such that if you selected a larger area at high-res, it downloaded at a lower resolution without telling you it was doing so - you didn't know until after you did the download and checked the results. You had to retry, selecting a smaller area to download but it was a hit-and-miss operation - extremely frustrating. I was one of the complainers about this one but they have apparently addressed the issue. I can't test it because at the moment I don't have access to a high bandwidth connection.

 

Dave

[+G & C]

I don't have a particularly high tech response to this thread, but I will say that I've been happy with my BirdsEye purchase for my Oregon 550t. It's treated me well, I've never had the cloud cover problem or the low res problem for the areas I've used it in, which vary from bigger city areas to the middle of the desert on the CA/AZ border. I like it.

[+dfx]

One of the big issues with BirdsEye is that recently there was a problem with downloading high-res images. Where before you could could download larger areas at high-res, there was a problem such that if you selected a larger area at high-res, it downloaded at a lower resolution without telling you it was doing so - you didn't know until after you did the download and checked the results. You had to retry, selecting a smaller area to download but it was a hit-and-miss operation - extremely frustrating. I was one of the complainers about this one but they have apparently addressed the issue. I can't test it because at the moment I don't have access to a high bandwidth connection.

 

Last I tried it was still doing that, which is also one of my gripes with it. The Birdseye service itself isn't bad - it's Basecamp that sucks so horribly much to make it a major PITA to use. It's much better now than it used to be, but still far from what it should be.

 

Since Birdseye doesn't seem to use any low flight images (only satellite, it would appear), there's nothing to fill in the poorer resolution areas.

Depends on the area. For some areas around here, you get the same imagery from Birdseye as you get on Google maps, which is also the same that you get (for free) on certain government GIS sites, and those are definitely aerial shots. Imagery not being uniformly good is a problem of every mapping service, be it Google, Bing or whatever else, but generally Birdseye has a higher chance of not having good imagery for a particular area.

[+BStheTech]

Thanks for the advice guys, Ecanderson your tip to d/l to the computer first worked great and saved me some frustration.

You guys are right, Basecamp is kinda funky. I live on Vancouver Island and wanted to d/l the entire island as a sat map.

The server would only let me do small parcels at a time which I had to stitch together to get full coverage. It eventually worked but

took an evening to do the southern tip of the island. Kinda hokey. But it works.

 

Is it just me or should Garmin be contributing some support to this site for assisting their customers. This is way

better than their useless website.

 

Thanks again,

 

bsthetech

[savant9]

The other painful thing is the way that basecamp wont "snap to a grid". Being that you are limited to such a small area per download, you need to make multiple zones to cover an area, then later you find that you missed a 30m wide strip some where so you need to make extra "patch" tiles to fix the map. It would be nice if you could just click select, predefined sections of a grid, so you dont need to worry about missing a sliver or waste the download on overlapping images. Garmins Birdseye server is also painfully slow for the downloads.

 

The quality of the images is good though for Southern Vancouver Island, Fraser Valley, Lower Mainland., but other areas where the resolution is low, you can still select a 232mb piece at "highest" setting, yet when the DL is finished you see the file is only 15mb because the image is junk. I can live with a junk image for a remote location, but if they are going to limit by file size, they should do so by the true file size.

 

I could go on on and on about the problems with Birdseye/Basecamp, but despite all that, the subscription for my Colorado just expired, so I bought a new one for my Montana. Its worth the $30 in my opinion.

[+CacheFreakTim]

I think Birds Eye is cool and worth the price, but my only issue is with the quality. Some areas look great while others do not. In just about every instance Google Maps has so much better quality maps and are 100% free. As long as you have a cell signal I almost always use them over BirdsEye.

[+michaelnel]

Google maps will usually allow you to zoom in closer while still holding better image quality than BE.

[+dfx]

I think Birds Eye is cool and worth the price, but my only issue is with the quality. Some areas look great while others do not. In just about every instance Google Maps has so much better quality maps and are 100% free. As long as you have a cell signal I almost always use them over BirdsEye.

 

Google maps will usually allow you to zoom in closer while still holding better image quality than BE.

 

Problem is that you can't store Google Maps imagery onto your GPS. Not easily, and not legally, anyway.

[+fegan]

It's a bit time consuming and chews up a lot of HD space...but you could always get USGS High Resolution Orthoimagery for FREE and spend the time geo-referencing it yourself.