I bought my Garmin Fenix 7 watch in 2023 and didn’t realise that it had one limitation that the slightly better models such as the Fenix 7 pro didn’t have. It comes with 16GB storage which meant that Garmin’s free maps didn’t fit on the device in a way that I wanted. Garmin didn’t want to release free maps for individual countries in Europe and all of Europe didn’t fit into the 16GB. They only supplied regions or all of Europe and the regions could not be installed together. Only one sub region could be installed at once. Their support stated that this would not change. This pushed me to find a solution as I wanted to be able to install maps from European countries that were not all in the same sub region.
I later realised that someone had created a great tool called mkgmap that takes data from OpenStreetMap and turns it into a map for your Garmin device.
Many sites will provide maps already created through a similar process too. Some great starter resources were:
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download
- https://garmin.opentopomap.org/ – pre rendered maps – great maps that inspired me to try and create my own
- https://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html – OSM data for download
- https://github.com/Jorisbo/Mkgmap-Mapnik-Style-Garmin – typ style for mkgmap that looks like the OSM mapnik style
My next post will have more details on how and what I have done myself to generate maps in a semi automated way.
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