Maps & Open Street Map
Maps are something you’re going to need when travelling or Geocaching. You can either use good old paper maps (which you should always take as a backup anyway), borrow a copy of an online map (France / UK) using a screen capture program, or purchase a map for your GPS. Most GPS vendors charge a substantial price for suitable walking maps on GPS, especially with topographic details includes (contour lines). Perhaps it isn’t that much when you consider the cost of buying the same data on paper, or the cost of creating the information in the first place, but it always feels like a lot.
OpenStreetMap has now become an excellent resource - as evidenced by the above animation and the fact that I haven’t bought an overpriced Garmin map for years. In combination with freely available the NASA SRTM contour data, it has become practical to roll your own topo maps, or download pre-rendered maps for your GPS.
Once you have the data in Garmin img format, then if you’ve got a recent Garmin device that can take img files over USB - it’s a simple matter of drag and drop.
If you’ve got an older device, you’ll need to use cgpsmapper and sendmap. It is possible to take the map data, and get Garmin’s mapsource to read it, but it is a more involved process.
Pre-packaged Garmin .img files
By far and above the simplest way to do this these days is to grab an image (.img) file from one of the existing services for pre-packaged OSM data. I used to recommend a series of possibilities for maps - but these days the best source WW is the Open MTB (Mountain Bike Maps) service - the first image below. Despite being optimized for mountain biking, it is actually pretty good for hiking.
I've just discovered the 4UMapsrendering which may actually be better for hiking (download, legend). They also partner with the Mobile Atlas Creator application which looks like it will offer the ability to create offline files for use in the android Locus app.
Alternative services do exist in the UK (TalkyToaster, Raven Family, and mapomatic), but they're generally not as up-to-date as the services below. I've also discovered mantlik and raumbezug sites recently although haven't tried either.
Creating your own maps from the OSM data
If you don’t like the styles of the above maps, or want a really up to date map from current OSM data, there are a number of programs that will allow you to create your own maps from the data. You can try the instructions below which have worked for me in the past, however there’s now a much better and more up to date guide on the openmtbmap page.
- First grab the OSM data (typically .osm). I’ve found 2 ways to do this successfully
- For small areas, and the most up-to-date data - grab josm, register an openstreetmap account and enter your username in the settings; then download the data for the area you’re interested in, and save it to an OSM file.
- For larger areas (whole countries), download the osm.bz2 file from cloudmade or geofabrik and extract it with something like 7zip
- Then convert it to an img file for sending to your GPS (assuming you have a recent USB device that supports img files). I’ve had the best luck using mkgmap, with a command line as below. If you’re loading multiple maps onto your GPS, be sure to give your maps a unique mapname (8 digit number) - otherwise you’ll only be able to see one of them.
- java -Xmx1024m -jar mkgmap.jar —mapname=63241234 —code-page=1252 —tdbfile —gmapsupp —latin1 —generate-sea=multipolygon —country-abbr=MC1 —country-name=MOROCCO —road-name-pois —route —product-id=99 —family-id=99 —family-name=”OSM Maps” —description=”OSM Casa” casablanca.osm
- I haven’t quite worked out how to get the —generate-sea command working at the moment. My last attempt for Lisbon seemed to have catastrophically flooded most of the city. You may find more job and less frustration by using the pre-packaged img files described above.
Contributing
Of course if you’re using OpenStreetMap data - and find something that’s not on the map - then you’ll be keen to fix the map and make the correction! There are several ways to contribute to OSM - the easiest being simply to upload the tracklogs from your gps unit. This is really easy, and allows anyone who is working on the map in that area to make updates. Just make sure that as you’re walking you have the GPS set to save your movements to a track. Once you get back to a PC - you’ll be able to grab the GPX file that represents that track and upload it to openstreetmap.org (after you’ve created yourself an account).
If you have an android smartphone, then you can capture additional data whilst you’re out with OSMTracker, and then use it later when editing via JOSM to make the changes, or make small updates (tags) live from your device using OSMapTuner.
There are 2 mainstream editing packages - which you can use to map the GPX file you captured on your GPS, and/or fill in details using satellite images from Bing (details of the Microsoft Bing OSM license). Potlatch2 - which is built into openstreetmap.org (under the edit tab screenshot), and probably the simplest place to start contributing. JOSM - is a more powerful tool - although it does have a learning curve - so it is well worth doing one of the tutorial videos or looking for one on YouTube.
Other map data options
In addition to data sourced from OSM, there are a number of other options. GPS Map Search appears to offer open-source maps, including some with topo data, but I’ve not had much luck getting these to work. I haven’t tested them - but mapstor seems to be offering a collection of topo maps created by the military agencies of Russia and some East European countries. In the US - GPS File Depot is apparently the best source for US topo maps, and has a limited selection of international maps (ref GPS TrackLog). In New Zealand - there’s an excellent resource at the NZ Open GPS project. It isn’t OSM, but it is ready to roll for Garmin devices.