[Closed] Wilderness GPS

Garmin Oregon 650 here, robust, big screen, 2 x AA battery's, SD card maps. Taken me across Portugal, used on trails in Poland, Italy, India, Dartmoor, Wales, Peaks, Forest of Dean. Big screen helps and free download baemap software works really well.

Cheers mate, will have a look at that then. Sounds like you have been a bit further than I intend to go though!!

Check out discontinued eTrex models. I got a NOS eTrex Vista HCX for £60. Using paper maps together with a base model eTrex H travelled NZ, Oz, Bali and Lombok 🙂

Lovely things.

assuming you've got a smartphone, take a look at backcountry navigator. It might do all you need

Another vote for an Oregon. I have the 600, so no built-in camera or rechargeable power pack (that is actually two AAs in a plastic case). Up to 16hrs life out of some good NIMH cells, touch screen interface, decent size and Basecamp software for the PC for route planning and archive.

Saves your phone battery for when you might need to make that emergency call.

Wilderness? Blimey, where are you going?

I've been using Etrex's since the mid 90's for 'location confirmation'. I prefer to nav by map and compass but every now and then, an accurate grid ref is useful (if you're in th middle of a cloud for example). I've tried navving using the GPS and it's not much fun. If you wanted to do it though it's easy to set up a breadcrumb trail to follow.

Etrex and more recent equivalents are £80 up or less s/h. I have the basic Etrex H model, all you need for an occasional grid ref though I do tracklog as well for data (distance, route etc).

Not trying to Hijack the thread, but has anyone got experience of how to get a detailed route onto the Vista hcx or similar?

I have Mapsource, and a basemap on the eTrex, but it's lacking the smaller roads and I want to push [url= https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Carlisle/Bradford,+West+Yorkshire,+UK/@53.8624052,-1.8925217,13z/data=!4m19!4m18!1m10!1m1!1s0x487ce1df3eee6b0f:0x5c0a43b6ba15682d!2m2!1d-2.932931!2d54.892473!3m4!1m2!1d-1.9407221!2d54.3707369!3s0x487c17090d693a7b:0xf6d9b93a8493bb69!1m5!1m1!1s0x48795f7ae9c21919:0x8fe0edd83227194f!2m2!1d-1.759398!2d53.795984!3e1?hl=en ]this [/url] route onto it.

Any ideas? I tried adding [url= https://sites.google.com/site/openstreetmapgarmincycleuk/ ]this [/url]map and saved it to the SD Card in a folder called Garmin, [or garmin] but it's not showing anything different when I reboot/show map.

Help! I need it working on Saturday Morning :/

Thanks

If you are really wanting to go into the wilderness you should get a GPS which takes batteries so you can take a spare set. I have a Garmin Map60 I use for sailing, we can be away from land/charger for 5 days.

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I've the Oregon 550 which I think is the older version of the one that pawsey bear has. No real complaints, it's been used on and off the bike and generally mistreated for a few years and is still fine. Does everything you're looking for, so it might be worth looking on eBay for a used version and maybe saving yourself a few quid. I bought it for the ability to swap the batteries out on multi day trips.

Some good food for thought there fellas, cheers.

gofasterstripes - Member
Not trying to Hijack the thread, but has anyone got experience of how to get a detailed route onto the Vista hcx or similar?

I have Mapsource, and a basemap on the eTrex, but it's lacking the smaller roads and I want to push this route onto it.

Any ideas? I tried adding this map and saved it to the SD Card in a folder called Garmin, [or garmin] but it's not showing anything different when I reboot/show map.

Help! I need it working on Saturday Morning :/

I'm just working from memory here so I could be wrong. It looks to me like you're using Edge logic on an Etrex. IIRC, they don't have routable maps in just vector ones (scalable pictures). I'm not familiar with Etrex file structure but your describing what you'd do with an the Edges which I know well.

With the Etrex H, I connect to a pc with a silly proprietary serial cable and upload a route from Memory Map in .mmo format. You don't even get into the units file structure so I can't say where the route is saved to. I can't see what format your route is in as I'm on a Tablet.

Have you got Memory Map? If your stuck why don't you just key the waypoints directly into your Visa with its existing mapping?

As somone who has had quite a few of the gps's, satmap, older garmins, memorymap etc...... Sell the garmin 500 and buy the garmin 810. It is slightly bigger than the 500 but it will act as a do it all gps, perfectly fine for remote rides. Youll need to but the OS maps as well.

For hiking i use the viewranger app with OS maps on my phone. Take a portable £20 phone battery charger with you for multiday/overnight camps.

for the OSM maps, to get them on a Vista HCx, you copy the gmapsupp.img file in to the Garmin folder on the SD card. there can be only 1 gmapsupp.img file on that device, althoug I get around that by having multiple folders, and renaming the one I want on a laptop, or generate a custom map containing all the tiles you'll ever need.

for the route/track in a .gpx file, you need to transfer it to the device using garmin or similar software. I use GPSBabel on linux to do that.

Yeah, I'm till doing something wrong. I have a gmapsupp file, no difference on the device. I successfully got an open street map file to appear in mapsource, but neither the track nor route I drew on it appear when I "send to device".

There's a .gpx showing in tracks/setup/data card setup, but the only option there is to delete it. I have told the device to log tracks to the SD card, still not showing in the list of tracks saved.

The info in: data card setup/menu button/data card info shows 0mb maps, .07mb tracks, 342mb misc, so it's clearly not recognising the map file on the SD. And there no way to show that pushed track or route

What size sd card are you using?

.

2gb, fat 32

With the Vista can you save a map file to the device. Is there one already there and the one one the card is supernumerary?

the .gpx showing in tracks/setup/data card setup are probably the ones recorded by the garmin to SD card? (they'll be date.gpx)

how are you getting that google map in to a .gpx file? and is it a track or a route? (I could understand it being truncated, since I guess it's quite long)

strange about the gmapsupp file. never had any issue on mine.

I'll check that when homehomew

I mean I'll check if there's more than one map.

The Google route is just what I want to copy, I don't think I can import it, sadly.

The satmap can run on AA batteries as well as the usual li unit.

A good thing about the satmap is being able to have it orientate the map to the direction your are riding, which makes following a route easy. I normally zoom it down to 1:3k so it relates to riding speed quite well.

I have OS maps on my phone but my app (omm) seems quite primative compared, for usability. I haven't seen other apps to compare, but I have been relatively frustration free using the satmap, which is pretty good going for me.

I don't know how well you can scroll the bike garmins in and out and move the map around in order to actually look around the area and work out where you are going next, but the satmap is good for that as the screen is quite big.

I'll have another go in a few hours.

Really, if anyone wants to continue helping [please 🙂 ] the make the jump to my thread about it:

http://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/adding-route-to-garmin-vista-hcx-when-the-basemap-doesnt-show-the-roads-needed#post-6874741

Cheers.