Recently I bought a Garmin GPSMAP 60csx, a kick-ass GPS handset with all the bells and whistles. It arrived from amazon the other day (cheaper than buying in UK even after shipping and customs) and I immediately set about prepping it for my upcoming trip back to Australia.
Supplementing the Australian portion of the Garmin USA base map
The Australian portion of the inbuilt US base-map appears to have been drawn on an etch-a-sketch by a blind monkey. This is a problem, especially as Garmin’s range of Australian map-packs are expensive and useless to anyone but soccer-mums ‘navigating’ to the local shopping centre.
Luckily the free Shonkymaps Australian map-set for Garmin contains full topographic 1:250,000 maps for the whole of Australia. Downloading these maps into your GPS is reasonably straightforward:
- Ensure you have Garmin MapSource for windows (mac version coming soon apparently).
- Download Shonkymaps direct or legally via bittorrent (you’ll save them 340mb of bandwidth).
- Install Shonkymaps (needs to write to registry to comply with Garmin’s cockamamy MapSource system).
- Shonkymaps can now be downloaded to your Garmin handset via MapSource just like any off-the-shelf Garmin map-set.
So how do Shonkymaps shape up? Well, see below for a comparison of their respective coverage of Moreton Island.
Google satellite image (left), Garmin base map (middle) & ‘Shonkymaps Full Topo’ (right)
Having a crack at geocaching
Wandering through the 60csx’s menu system (a habit with all new gizmos) I discovered a few features relating to geocaching (a never-ending decentralized global treasure-hunt game). As I’ll have some time on my hands over the break, I thought I’d give it a go. It turns out that setting up a Garmin GPS for geocaching is remarkably easy.
- Install the Garmin Communicator browser plug-in (supports firefox, woot!).
- Create a free account at geocaching.com, an online community which lists, manages and discusses everything related to geocaching.
- The geocaching.com site can be a little hairy at times, but if you head straight to their geocache map search page you’ll find a dead-simple UI for locating geocaches in your area.
- Once you’ve found a geocache you want to add, click it’s icon and a Google map balloon will appear containing the relevant details, including a ‘Send to Garmin link.
- Click the ‘Send to Garmin’ link, ensure your GPS is connected to your PC and click ‘send’ on subsequent page.
- Done! Here’s what the geocache waypoint info screen looks like. All the hard work’s done for us (except finding the actual cache)
In 60 seconds I had half a dozen geocaches loaded on my GPS and due to the fact I wasn’t involved in typing the lat/long, there’s a fair chance they’ll be reliable. Now my only excuse for not finding them will be a lack of navigation ability 
