montana 650

I got a Montana 600 about 6 months ago with the primary uses of geocaching and off road motorcycling. For these two activities I am extremely pleased. I use topo maps from www.gpsfiledepot.com and get my caches from www.geocaching.com.

I have been thinking about getting an SD card with the garmin US routable maps. I just cant seem to get the supposedly routable maps found on several sites to route for car use.

Kinda late but I have used this site in the past

http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

I bought an Etrex 30 for hiking and geocaching. I got some of the free maps from GPSFileDepot and you can't beat the price, that's for sure! I also bought the Garmin 24k Topo for my region and I'm really happy with that. It includes routable roads, plus all the topographic info and map shading, etc. I can select the 'Auto' profile on the Etrex and get turn by turn directions. No speech, of course. Just 'ding-ding' at the turns. But it otherwise behaves very much like my Nuvi. It makes a nice backup to the Nuvi in the car.

Then I switch to the 'Hiking' profile and everything is reset for hiking/geocaching. If you do buy a Garmin 24k Topo map, buy it on DVD. Don't buy the SD card or do the download. If you download, it will only install on the device and the map will only display in BaseCamp while the device is plugged in via USB. If you buy on DVD, it will install to the computer and show up in both BaseCamp and MapSource if you have them. If you don't care about BaseCamp/Mapsource, go for the convenience of SD or download.

I have the Montana 600, didn't want the camera.

On my Oregon 550, I use the OSM NA map from this site: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Downloa.... It works on the Oregon, so I think it will also work on your Montana.

There are 2 maps for North America, one by Ben Kenroth and one by Dave Hansen. I tried both of them and they both worked OK for routing on the Oregon, but I could only get the Hansen map to be recognized in BaseCamp. Maybe the Kenroth map got corrupted in download or maybe I installed it incorrectly (I just copied the downloaded .img file over to the SD card on the Oregon and BaseCamp wouldn't load it). Since the Hansen map worked in BaseCamp, I stuck with that one.

I only use the Oregon occasionally for automotive routing, and so far the OSM has been acceptable for that. However, address lookup only sort of works. It seems to get you to the right street, but not to the correct house number. So you have to do some adjusting if you are looking up an address.