Garmin custom (raster) maps without the limits - for Oregon, Dakota, etc

MackDeToaster

I love my Oregon, and a major reason why I purchased it was because of its custom/raster maps feature. Imagine my disgust then to find that Garmin had hamstrung it to 100 tiles.

Garmin also introduced their Birdseye service, which has been pretty useless to me, but the great news is that Birdseye has been hacked.

Basically, what this means is that it's now possible to use your own custom maps in Birdseye format (.jnx) without the limitations that .kmz files imposed.

I.E. .kmz - 1 level of detail, .jnx - 5 levels.
.kmz - 100 tiles, .jnx - up to 50,000, per level !

I am now one very happy camper as this has made my Oregon capable of what I believe it should have been in the first place.
For example, since .jnx files are capable of storing different maps at different levels, I can have Google Earth satellite images at the furthest levels of zoom. As I zoom in closer the maps can change to Openstreetmap roads, and then at an arbitrary scale I can have OSM maps overlaying high-res GE imagery.

I think it would be nice for Garmin themselves to cop on and drop their artificial limits before they find themselves rendered obsolete by new generations of smartphones running the likes of Viewranger, Pathaway and so on, but in the meantime if you want to do this you're first going to have to be prepared to apply a patch to your units firmware.

I myself have been running the 432 beta firmware on my Oregon so the first thing I had to do was download and reinstall an earlier version. This was so that I could apply a patch to the 432 to allow the Birdseye/.jnx files to be used without a signature.

I renamed the latest 432beta.exe to 432beta.zip and extracted the .gcd file from within that, then ran the patching software on the .gcd. This patching app can be gotten here

Once patched I copied the updated .gcd to my Oregon and updated as usual, which brought me back up to version 432, but patched.

Next it's a matter of creating calibrated maps from whatever source and using Mapc2mapc to create the .jnx files. Something like Mobile Atlas Creator might get you going.

I already had maps in OziExplorer format - *.map, *.ozf2 and *.png so for this example I'll describe using some of my Irish maps. My .map files, which contained the calibration coordinates, were pointing to the .ozf2 so I search and replaced to point them to the .png files instead (as Mapc2mapc doesn't need/use the .ozf2 files).
So now I had a .map file containing the calibrations/coordinates for each .png (which is the raster image that the gps will actually display).

Next I ran Mapc2mapc and changed its preferences to get the zoom levels I wanted - with my maps the default settings, i.e. the 130 setting, only showed the maps clearly at 300-500 feet, so I changed it to 340 and now the maps appear from 3 miles and text is very legible from about .3 miles.

You can also change the tile sizes - Garmin default is 1024x1024 and this is what I'm currently using but I'm also playing around with 512x512 etc to see how it affects the speed of rendering on the unit. So far however I haven't really noticed much difference.

Anyways, I could then have opened each map file from within Mapc2mapc and converted to .jnx but since I had 240 files this would take forever so I just wrote a batch file which basically had a line to call map2jnx.exe (basically a dos version of mapc2mapc) and each map file, e.g.

"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\001.map" -jnx
"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\002.map" -jnx

---

"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\200.map" -jnx


Once all the .jnx files have been created simply make a '\Garmin\Birdseye' folder on your unit (or sd card) if not already existing and copy in the .jnx files.

If the f/w has been patched right you should now be able to go to Settings and enable your Birdseye maps.

Hope this might be useful to somebody.

micawber

MackDeToaster wrote: »

I love my Oregon, and a major reason why I purchased it was because of its custom/raster maps feature. Imagine my disgust then to find that Garmin had hamstrung it to 100 tiles.

Garmin also introduced their Birdseye service, which has been pretty useless to me, but the great news is that Birdseye has been hacked.

Basically, what this means is that it's now possible to use your own custom maps in Birdseye format (.jnx) without the limitations that .kmz files imposed.

I.E. .kmz - 1 level of detail, .jnx - 5 levels.
.kmz - 100 tiles, .jnx - up to 50,000, per level !

I am now one very happy camper as this has made my Oregon capable of what I believe it should have been in the first place.
For example, since .jnx files are capable of storing different maps at different levels, I can have Google Earth satellite images at the furthest levels of zoom. As I zoom in closer the maps can change to Openstreetmap roads, and then at an arbitrary scale I can have OSM maps overlaying high-res GE imagery.

I think it would be nice for Garmin themselves to cop on and drop their artificial limits before they find themselves rendered obsolete by new generations of smartphones running the likes of Viewranger, Pathaway and so on, but in the meantime if you want to do this you're first going to have to be prepared to apply a patch to your units firmware.

I myself have been running the 432 beta firmware on my Oregon so the first thing I had to do was download and reinstall an earlier version. This was so that I could apply a patch to the 432 to allow the Birdseye/.jnx files to be used without a signature.

I renamed the latest 432beta.exe to 432beta.zip and extracted the .gcd file from within that, then ran the patching software on the .gcd. This patching app can be gotten here

Once patched I copied the updated .gcd to my Oregon and updated as usual, which brought me back up to version 432, but patched.

Next it's a matter of creating calibrated maps from whatever source and using Mapc2mapc to create the .jnx files. Something like Mobile Atlas Creator might get you going.

I already had maps in OziExplorer format - *.map, *.ozf2 and *.png so for this example I'll describe using some of my Irish maps. My .map files, which contained the calibration coordinates, were pointing to the .ozf2 so I search and replaced to point them to the .png files instead (as Mapc2mapc doesn't need/use the .ozf2 files).
So now I had a .map file containing the calibrations/coordinates for each .png (which is the raster image that the gps will actually display).

Next I ran Mapc2mapc and changed its preferences to get the zoom levels I wanted - with my maps the default settings, i.e. the 130 setting, only showed the maps clearly at 300-500 feet, so I changed it to 340 and now the maps appear from 3 miles and text is very legible from about .3 miles.

You can also change the tile sizes - Garmin default is 1024x1024 and this is what I'm currently using but I'm also playing around with 512x512 etc to see how it affects the speed of rendering on the unit. So far however I haven't really noticed much difference.

Anyways, I could then have opened each map file from within Mapc2mapc and converted to .jnx but since I had 240 files this would take forever so I just wrote a batch file which basically had a line to call map2jnx.exe (basically a dos version of mapc2mapc) and each map file, e.g.

"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\001.map" -jnx
"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\002.map" -jnx

---

"c:\program files\map2jnx.exe" "c:\map\200.map" -jnx


Once all the .jnx files have been created simply make a '\Garmin\Birdseye' folder on your unit (or sd card) if not already existing and copy in the .jnx files.

If the f/w has been patched right you should now be able to go to Settings and enable your Birdseye maps.

Hope this might be useful to somebody.

Is any of this possible with a garmin etrex vista hc? Uses gmapsupp.img ?
Have managed to use Talkytoasters combination of Openstreetmap and Irish contours, but would be interested if this avenur could be pursued.

MackDeToaster

micawber wrote: »

Is any of this possible with a garmin etrex vista hc? Uses gmapsupp.img ?
Have managed to use Talkytoasters combination of Openstreetmap and Irish contours, but would be interested if this avenur could be pursued.

I've had a look here but unfortunately it doesn't look like it's supported. I use Talkytoasters myself with these, it's great.

Alun

The only Garmins that support raster maps such as described above are the Oregon and Dakota series. With any flavour of etrex you're restricted to vector maps such as the OSM maps from talkytoaster (http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm).

micawber

Alun wrote: »

The only Garmins that support raster maps such as described above are the Oregon and Dakota series. With any flavour of etrex you're restricted to vector maps such as the OSM maps from talkytoaster (http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm).

Thanks for that Alun.

jolly47roger

The Colorado and some of the later GPSMap series support these maps, too.

Alun

jolly47roger wrote: »

The Colorado and some of the later GPSMap series support these maps, too.

True, I'd forgotten about them, esp. the replacement for the trusty old GPSMAP 60cs, the new 62s(t). The Colorado series is now EOL as far as Garmin are concerned, and never really caught on in a big way anyway.