This is something I’ve been longing a few years before… satellite imagery on a Garmin handheld. It was nearly three years ago when I wrote Why Aerial Images Matter and I feel no less about it today. Now Garmin has finally offered a supported way to add satellite imagery without having to build the map yourself. Welcome, Garmin BirdsEye.

The BirdsEye product will work similar to the DeLorme map subscription… pay $30 for the one year subscription and then you can use Garmin BaseCamp to transfer those maps to your GPS. The maps are described as high resolution, sub meter color imagery that “captures the world in brilliant clarity and detail”, although I doubt the entire world is captured at sub-meter resolution. 😉 If so– that would be insanely cool, but I doubt it.

1) Does one have to buy the Garmin BirdsEye TOPO US and Canada Card with Annual Subscription AND the Garmin BirdsEye Satellite Imagery Card with Annual Subscription or do they work independently (I.e. One is for topos only, one is for sat imagery only, so you can have either or both) 2) What happens to the maps / mapareas you download? You can download BirdsEye imagery to your computer and to a compatible Garmin ® device. Start the BaseCamp™ application, and connect your device to your computer. Select My Collection or a list to which the downloaded imagery file can be added. Select BirdsEye Download BirdsEye Imagery.

The subscriptions are good for one device, and downloads get locked to that device. You can purchase additional subscriptions for different devices. The maps can be stored in internal memory, or on SD card. Garmin BirdsEye is compatible with the Garmin Colorado, Dakota, and Oregon models. I expect the new product to be announced on Tuesday.
010-D0699-00 /virtual-villagers-5-free-download-full-version-unlimited.html.

I’m sure people will immediately make comparisons to the DeLorme subscription. The DeLorme subscription still has a few advantages, at least based on the information we have so far from Garmin. Garmin is offering aerial images, but the DeLorme subscription includes just about every map type that DeLorme has:

• Vector topo base map with 100k contours, routable roads, etc.
• USGS 24k topos
• b&w aerial imagery
• color aerial imagery
• NOAA marine charts including the Great Lakes
• Canada topos (new)
• high res city imagery (higher res than the standard color aerial imagery)
• Sat 10 imagery (low res).

We dive into the kind of maps you can load onto your Garmin GPS device and Basecamp.

There are 2 types of maps: paid vs free.

Paid Maps: You can go and buy the various mapping products from Garmin, including the subscription service called Birdseye Imagery where you can choose between satellite or topo images. Loading these maps onto your device is fairly easy via Basecamp

Garmin Birdseye Satellite Imagery Free Download Softonic

However for hiking, topo images may be a better option than the satellie simply because they do not provide the detail we’d want. Also depending on your area, you may have low-res satellite images.

Garmin Birdseye Satellite Imagery free download. software

Birdseye Topo is much more useful for hiking, but the main disadvantage is not knowing how old these maps are based on your area. Luckily, there is an easier & free method to get the same type of map.

Free Maps: Making a Garmin Custom Map using Google Earth is a good option which can take a few minutes to build. In our example, we’ve used the same data source to grab the latest published topo maps, cut a slice and made the KML file to import into Basecamp

The disadvantage is that Custom Maps are picky and you might have to tweak your KML file to get the results that you want.

The other free option is to simply search for “Free Garmin Maps”. A number of sites like GPSfiledepot.com and others will have repositories with submitted maps. Depending on your area this might be a useful resource.

If you are in Canada, there is the Ibycus Topo product, where the same government data source was used to grab the GIS (shapefiles) data instead of the raster images and produced Garmin maps using free tools. The advantage is that these are vector maps and will behave like the Garmin products like City Navigator or Garmin Topo. Meaning that you can zoom in tight and not have pixel distortion like the Garmin Custom Map or Birdseye Topo.

Another Free option which is to use the Garmin Openstreetmap (http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/) . This is a free service that compiles garmin maps from openstreetmap.org Depending on your area, the detail might be lacking, however being an open source project, anybody including yourself can contribute to the map in a few clicks.

Installing maps on our device is straight forward, take the img files and frop them into a folder named “Garmin” on your SD card. You can drop the file in the Garmin folder on the device, but there are limitation and you’ll have to rename your file gmapsupp.img

By placing your .img files on a SD card, you can rename them making it easier to manage. Also you can swap the card and insert into Garmin models.