Garmini GPSMAP 60c which maps?

Geoff I am not sure how many of these around but Bonz has one (60sc) but is away working - on the Desert Challenge. I had a look and know he is rapt in it. I was pleasantly surprised, even impressed. If you want to use OziExplorer though you have to have it on the laptop connected to the Garmin I believe. The two Garmin software systems would be selected on the detail you need for country roads or city. One has few minor roads in the country the other a lot but less detail in the city.

Hope someone can give you an answer soon, I know it can be frustrating. I bought a Magellan over a year ago. The screen on the Garmin is clearer than mine and can show more detail for the later technology.

Hi Geoff,

I've had the Garmin GPS Map 60CS for about 14 months now and it is great. Mine gets used between the yacht, motorbike (bush), 4wd and hiking.

I have the Garmin Bluecharts for use in the yacht and have found them to be extremely detailed and accurate.
For land based activities I use the Garmin Metroguide at the moment. I have been quite surprised at what it does cover. Most people are buying the City Navigator maps but as I live in a regional area I went with the Metroguide. I have not come across one road or track with extensive travel through western Qld and NT that has not been marked and named on the maps. It even has all of the fire trails marked through our local state forests. It will still give turn by turn instructions through when navigating and also features details of items of interest right down to the phone number of a restaurant or a fotty oval. I have been told that there will be topographical maps available by the end of the year which is what I am hanging out for but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I think the only way you can use the Oziexplorer software on the Garmin Map series units are to have the software loaded on to the laptop and just use your GPS as a receiver for the laptop as mentioned above. You cannot load other maps into these units.

For what you want to do I think you would be happy with the metroguide as you can store your tracks and waypoints on your GPS and store them on your home PC to be reloaded later on. I do all of my homework before I leave home and plot my routes accurately on the PC and name them. Then when I know I am going to a particular are I just upload all of the ones for that area into the GPS and head off. This is great in the yacht because I connect the GPS to the Autopilot and set it to navigate one of my presaved routes and then I am free to run forward and trim sails or go below and cook a meal and the GPS does all of the work.

They are a great little unit with the only colour screen that I have ever seen that can be seen clearly in full sunlight. Most people go for the MAP 76 for the larger memory but I have all of the Bluecharts from Sydney to the Whitsundays loaded as well as the complete Metroguide for Australia loaded and I think the memory is only just over half full. I also prefer the buttons at the bottom of the unit as the 76 has them all at the top and your hand is in the way half of the time.

Heaps of other litlle features that get a lot of use like tide predictions, hunt, fish, sun, moon tables, altimeter, easy to customise displays and waterproof. Too much other stuff to mention.

Give me a yell if you need to know anything else.

Cheers,
Brett

Another thing to check out is :-
hese are alternative maps for Garmin map based GPS receivers. I am a beta tester and use them on my Garmin GPSMAP 60CS (in addition to City Navigator) and they are pretty good.
The plan is to submit your track plot files and increase/improve the database when updates are done. Maps are uploaded using the Garmin software, so you need to buy a Garmin mapping product or the Trip and Waypoint manager as well...
I'm not sure when they will be available for purchase...
Regards,
Michael.

Mapsourse Metroguide & City Navigator 5 are being replace by the one improved program called City Navigator 6. It is 132mb - big!
I have talked extensively to Ian Linquist at Garmin - 9844 6666 re the improvements to the old Metroguide - he is extremely well versed with the program/s.
City Navigator 6 is due on the shelves in the next couple of days according to Brian Sommerville at GPSOZ, Mona Vale, Sydney. Phone 02 9999 2313. He too is extremely helpful and willing to spend time explaining things.
If you have heaps of $$$$$ look at Garmin 276C
Swoosh

Uploading your own Oziexplorer plot files and vector maps into a Garmin GPS is straightforward using software such as cGPSmapper and img2gps that is widely available from the web as shareware/free ware from http://www.cgpsmapper.com.

Using these tools should stop people complaining that the Garmin Base maps are inadequate - you can load whatever you want in there - either existing vector maps that you have/or have purchased and also .plt files of trips you have done or got from this site. These do not overright your GPS base memory - they use the normal 'customer' map storage area that is cleared on each upload.

Note that free downloads of 250k Vector maps of Oz are available from http://www.ga.gov.au. I would suggest the .shp files as the ones to use. These directly overlay on the Raster 250k series if you chose to check.

If using cGPSmapper, then use WGS84 as the datum as GDA is unavailable and AGD is around 120m different.

It takes some knowledge to make it work, but it is not difficult.

dja.