Open street maps, for use with satnavs

pabloescaban

VIP Member
Has anyone used this?
I have a Garmin satnav, UK and Ireland, which covers quite a chunk of Northern France.
This time i'm going a bit further South and the location isn't on my satnav.

After inquiring with Garmin, it appears I can purchase France map for $99.

This ain't happening so I googled free satnav maps and came across openmapchest and a few other sites where open maps can be downloaded and used on Garmin and other devices.

This is legal, there's nothing dodgy about it, they're maps put together by the public.

I didn't want 'W Europe' because it includes Estonia, Malta, Poland and a dozen other countries I'm never going to visit, to cut a long story short, I found separate maps on one of the sites and downloaded France, put it in (on a SD card) and it looks like it works, but it looks like it's missing some details, a few villages near where I'm going appear on google maps but no sign of them on the satnav streetmap.

If you download Australia, W Europe etc you can't put these whole maps on the SD card as they're too big and they need to be 'tiled' - that is, you open them on your PC, and choose the 'tiles' (large parts of countries) into one map and then these are used to make your desired map for the satnav.

I'm wondering if I DL the whole W Europe thing and create my own would it likely be the same as the one I already have or not?

Has anyone used them?
 
You could always stick your phone in a cradle and use google maps.
Tried using it a few times, it's crap.
If you go past a turning it tells you to 'drive 1.5 miles then turn left'
It can't work out that you need to make a U turn.
We drove around a lake last year for forty minutes, we were never more than 200m away from it but it kept saying, drive three miles, drive for two miles, drive for three miles, - we were doing laps of the destination without getting anywhere
 
Just out of interest have you tried Waze?
No but I read about it on one of the openmaps websites.
TBH, my genuine Garmin map only stops about twenty miles from this new lake were going, but after fishing that for a week I'm going roaming around France for a fortnight, one of the journeys is 300 miles .
Is Waze an Android app?
 
This is what Waze looks like on my in car screen.
 

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