Helloo all! Me and a friend will soon be in South America for 2.5 months on a bike tour through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. We have ourselves a Garmin Oregon 450, and we are looking to purchase the Garmin City Navigator® South America NT A couple of questions: - Would you guys consider open source maps over the commercial Garmin City Navigator map? - Is the Garmin City Navigator® South America NT known to be a reliable/detailed map? I know that while riding we will be off-route in many areas, should we consider a detailed topo map instead of the Garmin City Navigator? - Odd, but Garmin does not provide any maps for Bolivia. Would our best bet be a download from OpenStreetMap.nl? Can we rely on OpenStreetMaps for navigating in Bolivia? - Does OpenStreetMaps provide the most up to date open source maps for South America? Any other mapping websites we should consider? Thank you for all suggestions!
If your willing to swing it, I'd purchase Garmin City Navigator® South America NT for the trip. But there's nothing stopping you from downloading some free OSM maps to start planning your trip using Basecamp. Keep in mind, with OSM maps, you do get what you pay for. Regarding off-road riding, turn on tracking on the gps. You may not know where your going, but you'll know where you've been. Have Fun! daryl
We have been in partnership with Garmin Ecuador for a few years, providing them with tracks and updated information about routes and hotels - so for Ecuador we know its the best map out there...
Really old thread, but I came across it in a search and wanted to comment. In my experience (mostly navigating roads in Ecuador) OpenStreetMap is by far the best option I've found. Plus, it's free and you can contribute back when it's wrong. I've made dozens of fixes in Quito in the last few weeks, and it's great knowing that they'll be available for anyone to download almost immediately. I'd encourage anyone to use the OSM Ecuador map that you can download for free here: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ Let me know how it works out!
how often does the openstreetmap.nl get updated? I made some changes and would like to use them immediately but I guess I have to wait until they load an updated map..? Unless you know another way?
the world is compiled daily, your submissions may take two or three days to be approved. the more you submit, the faster they are implemented.
I've seen it take around a week for changes made to OSM to appear in the Ecuador map on openstreetmap.nl. This is consistent with this thread on Stack Overflow. Because of this delay, and because I'm also rather impatient, I wrote a program that allows me to build my own maps as soon as the changes propagate out to some of the repositories for certain parts of the world (specifically, I'm currently using Geofabrik for source data, and they seem to update around once per day). This reduces the delay to less than a day until you can see and use your changes. The down-sides are that: it isn't particularly user-friendly (I'm a programmer and I wrote it for myself). Still, it's only one command to generate a map for a country like Ecuador once you get the program installed. it requires you to download the "source" maps, so you may need to download some really large files (1-2 GB) before your computer finally compiles the maps. It's open-source, so feel free to give it a whirl. Court, if you're interested I'll give you an in-person demo when I'm back in Quito. Finally, I've toyed around with the idea of building something like openstreetmap.nl but with more real-time map data, and accessible to more open-source contributors. If this is something that anyone on this list would find useful, drop me a line. If I know that anyone other than myself is interested, there is a greater chance that I'd get around to writing it. :) Justin
