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How to fix BaseCamp

JR400C
over 15 years ago
One of the main reasons I purchased my Garmin 400C was the ability to load Unlimited Satellite Imagery on the unit. Kudos to Garmin for this! I don't mind paying a subscription fee for this if it makes it easier to use than Custom Maps, and it is! The only way to do this is thru using BaseCamp - which is also free by the way- Yea Garmin and thank you again!

I bought my subscription for BirdsEye and I was downloading Sat Imagery and all was right in the world. The download times were a bit long, and the program could use a bit of tweaking here and there with some new features, but hey, it's in it's infancy right? Right. I am a realist and I understand you can't get it perfect right off the bat with deadlines and whatnot. I get that.

As I collected more and more Imagery, the software began to slow down and exhibit stability issues and crash. A lot. I see that others have been experiencing similar problems. The first issue that we need to address is the memory consumption issue.

My take on it the problem is that BaseCamp seems to be loading that imagery into RAM by default, every time you open BaseCamp. If you have your GPS connected (which you must to download additional Imagery) then it loads that imagery (or some portion of it) into Ram as well. This makes for memory consumption that will grind even the most powerful computers out there to halt. I think the reason the programmers did this was to speed up panning and zooming on screen, which is all well and good, but there might be a better way to do this.

The solution to the memory problem?????

What if by default, BaseCamp does not load the BirdsEye imagery into RAM. Instead it loads just a little square... or maybe even a low res zoomed out "sat image skin" of the designated area. Next to the imagery in the column on the left hand side, what if there was another little box that you could check or uncheck that would load and unload the full detailed imagery into RAM (and the screen) and give you the increased performance that we all would like. That way we could only load the areas that we are working with at the time. Same goes for the imagery loaded in the GPSr unit and the removable media.


I'm no software engineer, but this seems to me like it would be a relatively easy fix to BaseCamp to solve the memory consumption issues.


Enhancement Requests

- let us define a more complex area of sat imagery to download other than just a square.

- Increase the size of the area that we can download at one time.

- Place "handles" on the edges of the downloaded imagery. This way, if we want to start a new download right beside the last one, we can easily "snap" to the corner of the previous one without having to zoom down to 60 feet to get really close without overlap or missed areas, then zoom way out to find the other corner, then zoom back in...

- Allow us to transfer the downloaded files to SD cards via USB 2.0 card readers. We are trying to funnel an ocean of information through a 1/2" garden hose when we transfer through the slow USB 1.0 connection in the Oregon.

Thank you Garmin for your support on this!
  • 0 over 15 years ago
    About your SD card suggestion. Until that is addressed, you can copy the .XML files from you Oregon \Garmin directory to the same path on the SD card. (Don't recall which, so copy both) You can then select it for output. For now, anyway.
  • 0 over 15 years ago
    What if by default, BaseCamp does not load the BirdsEye imagery into RAM. Instead it loads just a little square... or maybe even a low res zoomed out "sat image skin" of the designated area. Next to the imagery in the column on the left hand side, what if there was another little box that you could check or uncheck that would load and unload the full detailed imagery into RAM (and the screen) and give you the increased performance that we all would like. That way we could only load the areas that we are working with at the time. Same goes for the imagery loaded in the GPSr unit and the removable media.


    Thank you for your feedback. You are correct in that this feature is in its infancy. We are spending a lot of time improving the user experience, realizing that the current version uses too much memory per BirdsEye image. BaseCamp already does not keep the images in memory, or we'd have even more issues. It does however keep the data describing the image in memory. Since there are up to 20,000 image tiles per image even that is causing issues.
    Enhancement Requests

    - let us define a more complex area of sat imagery to download other than just a square.

    We're looking to add this feature in the future.
    - Increase the size of the area that we can download at one time.

    This probably won't happen in the near future, as there are device limits on how large the images can be as well.
    - Place "handles" on the edges of the downloaded imagery. This way, if we want to start a new download right beside the last one, we can easily "snap" to the corner of the previous one without having to zoom down to 60 feet to get really close without overlap or missed areas, then zoom way out to find the other corner, then zoom back in...

    To be clear, what do you mean by "handles"? You can resize the requested image by dragging the edges, but I think you're asking for something different.
    - Allow us to transfer the downloaded files to SD cards via USB 2.0 card readers. We are trying to funnel an ocean of information through a 1/2" garden hose when we transfer through the slow USB 1.0 connection in the Oregon.

    You already can do this. Once the image is in BaseCamp, you can drag it onto a card, even if it is in a card reader.
  • 0 over 15 years ago
    Thank you for your reply, azdrmn.

    When we are defining a new block of BirdsEye, it would be nice to snap the new corner of that window exactly on to the corner of an existing block. This eliminates overlaps or gaps that you can not see without zooming way in and guessing that you are lined up. Handles are used on many photo editing programs to drag and resize photos for example.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 15 years ago
    You already can do this. Once the image is in BaseCamp, you can drag it onto a card, even if it is in a card reader.


    Could you expand on that a little? I have 12 BirdsEye images in BaseCamp and they are listed in the lower left pane. If I try to drag one of those to the K:\Garmin\BirdsEye folder, it refuses to do anything. Are you saying we should be able to drag and drop these from within the program? Or is there something else I should be dragging?

    I can right-click on one of the BirdsEye images and send it to the storage card however. Is that what you meant?
  • 0 over 15 years ago
    About your SD card suggestion. Until that is addressed, you can copy the .XML files from you Oregon \Garmin directory to the same path on the SD card. (Don't recall which, so copy both) You can then select it for output. For now, anyway.


    I don't understand what you are saying about "XML files" and "select it for output", EMMAPOC. Could you elaborate please?

    I was requesting that we could send the .jnx files from BaseCamp to an SD card through a USB 2.0 reader to speed up the process. As it is now, we have to send to the SD card through the GPSr which is slow and I have crashed BC lots of time just trying to transfer. BC slows down tremendously when the GPSr is attached, and I must do that to transfer.