The work described in the first article was mostly done while I was working in the orienteering club Varegg.

the Iphone or an Android phone).Īs detailed in the first article in this series, there are a number of reason why you would want to put orienteering maps on your GPS unit. The third article considers showing your position on a modern mobile phone with GPS receiver (e.g. This second article considers how to show orienteering maps on the newest Garmin GPS units (Oregon / Dakota / Colorado) as raster maps using a much more straightforward procedure taking you only a few minutes for a map.

This first article considered the conversion of any OCAD-file to a Garmin vector map (.img-file) – usable for most Garmin GPS units which have a map mode. This article is the second in a series about GPS and orienteering here at, exploring what new technology can do to get orienteering and orienteering maps out to more people. The good thing for you as an orienteer is that QuickRoute can export kml/kmz-files, and only small modifications are necessary to these kml/kmz-files to make Garmin Custom Maps which you can use directly in your GPS. Garmin Custom Maps are actually a special type of kml/kmz-files – the native file format of Google Earth. How come you haven’t heard about this before? Garmin only recently made it possible to use Garmin Custom Maps on the newest Garmin GPS units – the Oregon, Dakota and Colorado series – and for now it is only available in a beta version of the firmware for the GPS units. If you want to get going straight away – click here to go directly to the conversion details. There are some small catches regarding map size in the simple procedure explained below, but it is not too difficult to overcome this.Īs in the first part of this series all software is freely available – the main difference is that this one is really easy you’ll have your first map up in no time! On your GPS unit you can then use the generated map in the same way as any other Garmin map – showing your position on the map, aligning the map correctly, panning and zooming. And the map looks exactly like it does on paper, as this procedure uses raster maps. Now it is really simple – and it looks perfect! It takes less than 5 minutes to get a orienteering map on your Garmin GPS device – and then you can see exactly where you are on the map using your GPS.

Garmin custom maps maximum size