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:

1. Ensure you have Garmin MapSource for windows (mac version coming soon apparently).
2. Download Shonkymaps direct or legally via bittorrent (you’ll save them 340mb of bandwidth).
3. Install Shonkymaps (needs to write to registry to comply with Garmin’s cockamamy MapSource system).
4. 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.

1. Install the Garmin Communicator browser plug-in (supports firefox, woot!).
2. Create a free account at geocaching.com, an online community which lists, manages and discusses everything related to geocaching.
3. 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.
4. 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.

   

5. Click the ‘Send to Garmin’ link, ensure your GPS is connected to your PC and click ‘send’ on subsequent page.
6. 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