Upgrade your old Garmin with open street map.

If you have an old garmin with poorly updated maps and no lifetime mapupdate available, a map from open street map may be an option.

I have successfully extended the life of my almost ten year old garmin, free and legal.
Here I will describe the steps I did and as always: Do a backup before you start to play around!

Part one: Order a map.

In the first post in the thread "Free routable maps for Garmin" we have an excellent place to get a map: http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

When you open the site there are some question marks that needs attention.

First question mark: Choose your map type.
There are some options:

Generic routable
Generic routable New style
Routable Bicycle (Openfietsmap Lite)

I have only tried the generic routable and the other options are unexplored by me.

Second question mark: Include a TYP file.

None or mapnik is the option.
A typ file i belive is a different color theme for the map (unexplored by me)

Third question mark: Choose a predefined country.

Here you can select a specific map for the country you want.

Fourth question mark: Perhaps you'd like to add some additional tiles?

If you check the box here you have the option to create a custom map , one can choose the parts of the world you want, regardless to national borders.
A small map of a region or a giant.

Left click will mark square maps and leftclick again to unmark areas you dont need.
Left click and move the cursor is an effectively way to rough selecting an area. Then you can left click areas you dont need.
It is possible to push: Reset selection and start all over if you change your mind.

In the left side of the website you can see how big the map is in compressed size.
The map i order had the size of 1,2 Gb, when it was decompressed the size was 1,6 Gb.

When you are ready and happy with the map it is time to fill in an email adress.
After that just hit the button: Build my map

Now you get an email with a link to a website where you can see the status of the map production.

Part two.

The map is ready, you will get a notification mail with a link to a download site, there is a window of 60 hours to download the map.

The map can be downloaded in different versions:
osm generic windows.exe (basecamp/mapsource)
osm generic tiles.zip (Qlandkarte/Linux)
osm generic macosx.zip (basecamp/roadtrip for mac users)
osm generic gmapsupp.zip (for sd card directly)

For me i have only tried the gmapsupp.zip

Download it and extract it in your computer, the name is gmapsupp.img after it is extracted.

After that its time to put it in your garmin.

I put the map (gmapsupp.img) to my sd card in the folder "Garmin" and then put the memorycard back into the garmin.

To choose the new map i go through this steps:
Settings
Map
Map info, and here i check the box to choose my new "OSM generic routable"

When I was convinced that the map works as i want, i connected my garmin to the computer with a cable and removed the old map from the internal memory.

Two spontaneous things I responded to:
The map has now newly constructed roads that I've missed for some time.
My garmin has become faster, i guess that it was a good thing to free up space in the internal memory by remove the old map.

best of luck

Jocke