US contour lines for Garmin?

[+Hynz]

On my Garmin Orgeon 600 I would like to overlay contour lines from parts of the USA on top of my OSM map (generated by Lumbertus's http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl).

https://openmtbmap.org offers those but only for paying members (which I'm a bit reluctant to become).

https://extract.bbbike.org is great in its options for different maps but I am facing two problems with those "World Contours Garmin (40m)" maps:

*) they are not transparent so they can not be used on top of another map

*) they seem not very detailed (in contrary to the screenshots on that site)

 

Does anybody have comments about my above findings and/or suggestions if there are other sources for SRTM maps for a Garmin GPS?

Edited October 9, 2018 by Hynz

[+Mineral2]

what part of the US are you in? Go to www.gpsfiledepot.com to find topo maps for all states and regions of the US. The topo maps won't be transparent, but if you have both the OSM map and the topo map enabled with the topo map layer on top, you can still use routing along roads.

[+Mineral2]

There is also this site: http://www.gmaptool.eu/en/content/usa-osm-topo-routable

But I've never been a fan of the way that the OSM contours are presented.

[+ecanderson]

On 10/9/2018 at 11:37 AM, Mineral2 said:

what part of the US are you in? Go to www.gpsfiledepot.com to find topo maps for all states and regions of the US. The topo maps won't be transparent, but if you have both the OSM map and the topo map enabled with the topo map layer on top, you can still use routing along roads.

Haven't investigated other states lately, but the Colorado topo is 7 years old.  OSM or similar would be an essential addition for any road routing.  Even a fair number of topo features have changed (water features, most particularly) since 2011.

[+Mineral2]

8 hours ago, ecanderson said:

OSM or similar would be an essential addition for any road routing.

For road routing, yes. But then, topography isn't really necessary for road routing, except maybe for cycling. When I'm hiking (and geocaching), I care less for routing because I need to know my actual location and destination and not the road-locked equivalent. While the trails on OSM are nice for estimating distance, I find that most trails aren't based on GPS data so much as old USGS trail data which is either outright an estimate or out of date as the trails have moved since they were first built. 

Topography features tend not to change that much, so using a 7 year old map isn't the end of the world. Sure, sandy barrier islands will change in that short period of time, as might portions of the island of Hawaii. No matter what map we're using, paper or digital, there's going to be some divergence from ground truth for whatever reason, usually because not all changes are updated on a timely basis. In the end if we know what we're doing, we can navigate just as well with the old GPS60 as we can with the new 66s and a 24K topo map installed.

[+Hynz]

On 10/9/2018 at 7:37 PM, Mineral2 said:

what part of the US are you in? Go to www.gpsfiledepot.com to find topo maps for all states and regions of the US.

Thanks for pointing out gpsfiledepot. Guess I will find something useful. Elevation data will not be that crucial on my trip.

 

I will visit Washington, DC and will drive around the region. I don't like to make detailed plans where to go and as mentioned I already have downloaded an OSM map covering a rather big area. Ideally I would like just to overlay this map with (as you correctly say rather static elevation data) and for my home area in Europe I'm using now for years SRTM data (from the previously free accessable openmtbmap) which is static while I'm updating the routable OSM map from time to time.

For Europe there exists also the very nice https://opentopomap.org which has elevation data included and resides in parallel on my GPSr.

 

I'm still interested if anybody here is using the elevation data from bbbike.org and does not have the problems I'm facing with the resulting file.