Hypsography

OK, let's suppose that based on the information at hand you buy a Garmin Etrex Vista CX to keep from having your bleached bones discovered months after an adventurous mountain biking excursion gone horribly wrong. Works fine, and you figure that you'll get some maps and plug them in, it'll be easy and cheap. Here's the deal. Garmin decided that they never want anyone else on the planet to make a nickel off their hardware, so the map format is proprietary. Jerks.

Well, all right then you figure that Garmin will have the maps you want. Bzzzzzzzzzzt, wrong answer, but thanks for playing. Topo maps come in various resolutions and the one you want (well, I want) is 24k:1 rather than the crude 100k:1. Too bad that the only 24k Garmin topo maps only include national parks, the North America version is 100k. Look, if you're not going to let anyone play in your sandbox, that sandbox ought to be pretty complete. Now since Garmin has basically told their user base to suck it, I'll just have to find another way.

The twisted path this leads down is truly a long one. I haven't gotten to the point where I have a usable map, but there seem to be two main pathways. Interestingly, the middle of both pathways involves something called a "Polish Map Format" (.mp) file. I've downloaded no fewer than six free software packages and I expect there's going to be one I'll even pay money for and it's still not there. Here are the major facts:

• seamless topo maps are free from the USGS
  
• there's even another format available
  
• Garmin's file format ain't so secret any more
• the GPS background map is on the data card in a file called gmapsupp.img
• my opinion is that ultimately it will be better to copy the file directly onto the SD card.
  

For now here are the sites I've found:

1. How to use seamless maps (plus some other stuff)
2. How to with SDTS files
3. They all use cgsmapper (get the free stuff)

As I say, this is a work in progress. This is just the surface, if you go through the websites you'll find that even more software is necessary. Also, I'd like to get this done without editing the registry on my computer. When I figure it all out I'll recommend one method or the other and please leave a comment if you figure it out.