I bought a used eTrex Legend C today. It finds my location, and the
centre of my village, about 2 miles away, but nothing else appears on
the screen. It is as if I live in the middle of a featureless sandy
desert. It doesn't even admit the road going past my house. It does
show a major road, about two miles away, but as a single straight
line, unlike the road itself, which having been built by the rolling
English drunk, rolls around all over the place, never going in
straight line.

Is this normal? It won't be much good walking around in my local area,
if so.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

Swifty wrote on Oct 15, 2010:

> I bought a used eTrex Legend C today. It finds my location, and the
> centre of my village, about 2 miles away, but nothing else appears on
> the screen. It is as if I live in the middle of a featureless sandy
> desert. It doesn't even admit the road going past my house. It does
> show a major road, about two miles away, but as a single straight
> line, unlike the road itself, which having been built by the rolling
> English drunk, rolls around all over the place, never going in
> straight line.
>
> Is this normal? It won't be much good walking around in my local area,
> if so.
>
>

What you are seeing is the so-called base-map which is all that is installed
on most Garmin hand held units when bought new. You will have to install some
maps before you can see anything more. These can be purchased from Garmin
(see the website) or there are various sources of free maps which you can
Google for.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
mike_lane at mac dot com

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 20:30:55 +0100, Mike Lane wrote...
> What you are seeing is the so-called base-map which is all that is installed
> on most Garmin hand held units when bought new. You will have to install some
> maps before you can see anything more. These can be purchased from Garmin
> (see the website) or there are various sources of free maps which you can
> Google for.

Such as http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm

--
Tim Jackson
(E-Mail Removed)d
(Change '.invalid' to '.plus.com' to reply direct)

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:42:33 +0100, Tim Jackson
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Such as http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm

Thanks. I'd been there, but ran into problems. The "UK All" map didn't
appear to have Hampshire, and sendmap.exe appeared to hang when I
tried to send a map chosen at random. My device already has the Isle
of Wight, downloaded by sendmap.exe in 2006, so it much have worked
back then.

I really only got this GPS to see if I'd use it much; so far the
answer is "probably not", which will save me from buying a good one.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:23:28 +0100, Swifty wrote...
> On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:42:33 +0100, Tim Jackson
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
> >Such as http://talkytoaster.info/ukmaps.htm
>
> Thanks. I'd been there, but ran into problems. The "UK All" map didn't
> appear to have Hampshire, and sendmap.exe appeared to hang when I
> tried to send a map chosen at random. My device already has the Isle
> of Wight, downloaded by sendmap.exe in 2006, so it much have worked
> back then.

Might have been an error when he compiled the map file. I think he
recompiles them fairly frequently if you can be bothered trying again.

If your GPS is recent enough to have the direct USB storage facility
then you don't need to use Sendmap. Have a look at the Setup menu (off
the main menu screen) and see if one of the options is called Interface.
If so, then plug in to a USB port of your computer, select the USB
storage mode on the Interface screen, and just drag and drop the .img
file as if the GPS was a USB memory stick. More instructions on the
Talkytoaster webpage.

--
Tim Jackson
(E-Mail Removed)d
(Change '.invalid' to '.plus.com' to reply direct)

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:59:47 +0100, Swifty <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>It won't be much good walking around in my local area

For anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation as me, I
managed to download free maps and install them on my Garmin eTrex
Legend C.

The main problem was that I needed an older (Legacy?) version of
sendmap20.exe

Once I'd got that sorted, I downloaded a map segment for my local area
from Open Streetmap and then used Mkgmap to convert it to an img file
that sendmap20.exe loaded into my GPS.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk