Sunday, March 18, 2012

Lowrance opens up to third-party map developers

Cartography-ToolkitNavico, a marine electronics company which owns Lowrance, has announced a cartography toolkit for third-party map developers. The handheld Lowrance Endura series is among those supported, and the toolkit also supports raster imagery.

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Free MyTrails map now covers 37 states

MyTrailsJim Bensman’s free MyTrails map for Garmin receivers now covers 37 states, including the entire eastern US. Pretty cool for a project that started with just St. Louis area trails! This goes to show what one person can do, and it makes it even harder for me to understand why Garmin hasn’t put out a better trail product, given the massive amount of trail data found at Garmin Connect.

This is a transparent trail map, so it won’t block other maps enabled on your device. In the image at left from Asheville, NC’s popular Bent Creek area, some trails (gray) are on the underlying Garmin Topo US 2008 product, while others (red) only appear on MyTrails.

To get the MyTrails map, simply follow the link above and download and run the .exe files. Once they run, the map will be available in MapSource or BaseCamp. While the trails aren’t routable, it is nice to have additional information available on your GPS while out in the field.

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Garmin Rails to Trails maps

Garmin-Rails-to-TrailsGarmin has partnered with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) to offer six regional mapping packages at $9.99 a pop. You can preview coverage at RTC’s TrailLink site (which offers free .gpx downloads, BTW!). Here are links to the Garmin maps:

 

Via  Jake’s Journal

TOPO Afghanistan

Topo-AfghanistanTOPO Afghanistan is being announced today by North Hollywood Cartography, an authorized Garmin MPC developer. This is actually the third-generation of the product; the first was released through GPS File Depot. The next iteration included the entire country. The newest version adds a digital elevation model for 3D viewing in BaseCamp and compatible Garmin receivers. Geographic points of interest including wadi (arroyos/dry creek beds), summits, kariz and settlements.

Sales will be through government distributors and to individuals affiliated with the ISAF or other government users.

While there are military issue GPS receivers being used in Afghanistan, I’ve been impressed by the number of comments and questions I’ve heard over the years from troops using their own standard, commercially available handheld units in the field.

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Garmin BirdsEye Select brings raster topos to Europe; US to follow?

BirdsEye-Select-DeutschlandWell, well. I think I missed the story in Waypoints when I said BirdsEye goes international. What’s new is not the international coverage; it’s the BirdsEye Select products that bring detailed raster topo imagery to Garmin handhelds.

The UK has had such imagery for awhile, and I’m not sure what all the differences are between the Garmin GB Discoverer series (which offers both 1:50K and 1:25K scale maps) and the Garmin Select product at 1:25K. Perhaps some of our friends across the pond can chime in.

What’s interesting to me though, is this bringing us closer to seeing a quality USGS topo product from Garmin. At least I’m hoping that’s the plan.

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MapSource Product Creator

DEM image Ever had the itch to make your own maps? Wished that you had access to the same cartography tools used by Garmin? Well, your dreams may be coming true. A new MapSource Product Creator page on Garmin’s developer site offers you the opportunity to…

Create custom maps that can be easily loaded into Garmin devices with the MapSource Product Creator (MPC). The MPC can create everything from full country topographic maps to maps for specific industry, military or research applications.

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Garmin quietly adds maps of Mexico to your nuvi

Mexico nuvi map Done a map update lately? If so, you may want to check your nuvi and see if it’s ready to head south of the border. The screenshot above is from my nuvi 765T after the latest map update. From GpsPasSion:

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Finally — Garmin City Navigator Israel NT!

City Navigator Israel NT

UPDATE: According to Garmin support, this product is only compatible with the nuvi 1xxx models. (Thanks Alex)

In my nearly five years of GPS blogging, I’ve had more requests for GPS maps of Israel than any other country. Hence, I thought this morning’s release of Garmin City Navigator Israel NT warranted a post. The link may throw an error, but the page should be available shortly if it’s not now. The maps cover most of Israel, including Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Eilat (I’ve included a coverage map below, after the jump). Roads and names can be displayed in either Hebrew or English.

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Garmin international topo maps

Garmin-international-topos A lot of new topo map products have shown up on Garmin’s website. Some of these may have been available for awhile, but most appear to be new. I’ll also note that they seem to be different than the offerings from Garmin’s long running third-party MapSource developer program. In addition to the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Australia, I’m now seeing:

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Two new tools for making Garmin custom maps

Garmin-aerial-Raleigh I didn’t think this would take long. Some of the more technically adept GPS enthusiasts among us have put together some great tools for creating custom maps for the latest generation of Garmin handhelds. Here are two new ones released in the last day or so. Both allow you to create maps without manually calibrating them in Google Earth.

G-Raster

Created by Lester Pawlowicz of Free Geography Tools, G-Raster allows you to create maps from imagery freely available online. The following formats are supported:

  • GeoTIFF
  • MrSID
  • NOAA BSB (.kap)
  • ERDAS (.img)
  • USA PhotoMaps Big JPEG
  • UTM world file images
  • World file images for other coordinate systems

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