GPS & Maps for international travel?

[+spoongirldeb]

Ok, so I've been geocaching for about a year and am quite happy using my phone and NeonGeo app :-). However, I am about to head to Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific for a 3 1/2 week vacation. I would LOVE to do some geocaching while there. But have zero desire to pay data roaming even if my plan allows it (which I'm not sure it does). So I was thinking it was time to move to a handheld GPS device. I've been searching the forums here for advice, and found lots of pros/cons for various devices. My concern is how I get maps for that part of the world? Are there free sites? Garmin's maps are pricey...seems like some of their GPSs come with terrain maps but I'm not really sure what I need! Don't want to pay $150-350 for a GPS only to have it not work because I don't have maps! I don't know how that works...do I even need maps? Help!

 

Thanks,

 

spoongirldeb

[+webscouter.]

I can only speak to what I use.

 

I have Garmin GPS units and use maps from http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ anytime I am out of the United States. The maps aren't perfect but they will get you around. You cannot search for POI (IE hotels, restaurants etc) but the roads are usually all there.

 

The GPS units will work without maps for geocaching. The only thing is that the first time you turn on the GPS overseas it may take a few minutes to acquire the satellites.

[+splashy]

"You cannot search for POI (IE hotels, restaurants etc) but the roads are usually all there."

 

You can.

[+Hynr]

I use this link:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download

scroll down to Oceania for Australia and NZ.

 

The maps are generally pretty good but can only be as good as the OSM data itself. In many areas they are more up-to-date than the Garmin maps. Last fall when I went to New Zealand I found two sources, each with a different img file to put on my Montana. Those were these links

http://www.osmaustralia.org/NZ-garminroute.php

http://www.aighes.de/OSM/index.php?lang=en

I found it useful to have several versions of the same map. The Montana allows you disable all those that you don't want to use at a time, so since I had enough room on the SD card, I was able to carry them all and enable only the one I wanted at a time. That came in handy because one of the South Island maps of NZ had a defect that caused the GPS to have trouble routing between Picton and Christchurch.

 

My Montana 650t came with a topo map that also has roads. That map set is quite pathetic as a road map. The USA roadmap that I have from one of the links at the above site has roads which I personally added a few weeks ago as OSM contributor. It will be years before you see that road correction on a Garmin map. This sort of editing is happening daily and in many parts of the world.