My question is that I just bought the etrex 20 and bought the 24k western us DVD. On my MacBook, the maps look good, but on my etrex they are nowhere near like the desktop version. I zoom in and out but can’t seem to get the details I want. I followed instructions until it said download complete.

Am I missing something?

Here’s a story idea: with Christmas coming, lots of people will have new GPSrs and maybe some of them will discover they don’t have as many uses for them as they thought they might.

This spring, based on your recommendation, I upgraded from my old Geko to a Dakota and I’m very happy with it. While I bought the Dakota primarily for mountaineering and backcountry skiing, my first real test was a ten day conference in Stockholm. I thought having a street map on the Dakota might help me navigate my way around the city.

Since I was unlikely to visit Stockholm frequently, I was unwilling to pay for commercial maps. After a bit of web hunting, I found openstreetmap.org. This is the user-built street mapping equivalent of Wikipedia.

I downloaded the Stockholm map (already in Garmin format) and easily transferred it to the Dakota. I found the map to be incredibly detailed and accurate. And it was supplemented by hundreds of POIs which made finding restaurants, etc, exceptionally easy. (I should note that Stockholmers are invariably polite and almost all speak English, but I was loathe to ask directions, since these would invariably involve Swedish street names, which are invariably long and incomprehensible to me.) The Dakota flawlessly followed OSM data to provide me with efficient routes to my destination, and frequently located pedestrian routes avoiding roads.

Happy with my Stockholm Openstreetmap experience, I decided to see what was available for my home in Canada. And the answer was – not much. So I set out on my bike to map every foot and bike path, park, body of water, etc. in my home town. Once I had loaded the data from the GPS to computer and then to Openstreetmap’s in-browser editing screen, it was easy to map all the missing features. And other OSM users run sites dedicated to making this data available to Garmin users.

So now I have both free topo maps (from Ibycus) and routable street maps (from OSM)on the Dakota. My wife and Inavigated a month long road trip using OSM maps exclusively. While we noted a few glitches, the maps were mostly dead accurate.

So why not post an article encouraging your many readers to join OSM and start mapping around their homes by foot, bike, or auto? It’s a great way to learn how to use a GPs, to create more detailed maps that you can actually use, to explore your neighborhood, get some exercise, and to benefit other GPS users.

The OSM site contains many tutorials and experienced users are more than willing to answer questions. There’s no limit to how much detail one can map, and I think the Europeans are well ahead of us.

http://bestofosm.org/

THX!

G.