Garmin memory

[+Pharisee]

Being a total novice and by no means an electronics wizard, I chose the Etrex Legend as my first GPS receiver. It's very pretty and works well but I'm a touch disappointed that I can only download three MapSource sheets in at a time. Does any one know if the 8Mbyte memory can be increased, please.

[+st_richardson]

I've never been inside one to know if it could be hacked to handle more. Anders (a frequent poster that has a wealth of GPSr knowledge and trivia) might know. My guess is no. I have the Vista and my daughter has the Legend. She had to be selective as to what part of the Greater Atlanta area she loaded also.

[+apersson850]

It's about as impossible as it is to travel to the moon. That is, it can be done, but takes a lot.

 

If you look inside your Legend, the first thing you'll notice is that virtually everything inside is SMD chips. Just removing them without destroying the unit takes special tools.

 

Second, even if more memory is installed, I doubt the unit will allow you to use it. Since they have a different version of firmware for every device, it may just as well be that every firmware knows about how much memory it has available, instead of letting the firmware find out each time you turn on your unit. So, to use 24 MB, for example, you would need the Vista firmware. But that won't work either, since then it will look for the altimeter and the compass, and will consider your unit faulty.

This is probably the least mysterious thing that could occur...

 

Anders

[Alphawolf]

quote:

---

I can only download three MapSource sheets in at a time

---

I'm not sure what you mean by "sheets". I live in Utah and can load 7 of the Metroguide maps before I max out the Legend. This is the top 1/3 of the state approx. In Topo, I can get about 35 maps, that is still about the top 1/3 of the state. Even in crowded Los Angeles, CA, I can get 4 of the Metroguide series on 8 megs. of memory. If you are using MapSouce 4.09, make sure you have checked the box under the "transfer" tab under "preferences" under "edit" so as to turn off the autorouting support. This takes a whole bunch more memory.

 

"Never take a sunset for granted. Stop what you are doing and enjoy it. You never know when it may be your last"

[+Minex]

I'm not sure what you mean by "sheets" either. I own a Legend with Topo, and I'm able to get about 25 maps of Colorado onto my unit. Just a reminder, though, that uploading 8 megs worth of data onto the unit takes forever. I couldn't imagine 24 megs.

[+Alan2]

24 megs on a Vista takes about 50 minutes to load. Of course, if you only select 8 megs of data to load, it should take about the same time as a Legend. I don't know how long that is because I always load the full 24 megs.

 

I suppose if you're on the raod with a laptop in the trunk and you forgot to load maps of the area you're caching, you could just select a few maps of the area and load those within miniutes in a Vista or Legend. Again I haven't tried that but it seems like that's what would happen.

 

Alan

[+Pharisee]

Thanks for taking the time to reply and sorry if I confused you with my reference to "sheets". I'm using the European version of the Mapsource software and the British Isles is divided up into rectangular sections that I refered to as "sheets". These vary in size but are, on average, between 2Mb and 3Mb so I can usually on load three at a time into the 8Mb of Garmin memory. I guess I'll get used to it