New user - maps advice

Perhaps he bought a non European F6s?

One other thing to add, if you are wanting to navigate a pre-defined Course on the watch, rather than the watch taking over and routing you using it's own maps, you need to go to Menu>Activities & Apps>Hike (or whatever outdoor app)>Hike Settings>Routing>Courses>Follow Course (rather than the 'Use Map' option).

Volker said:

Perhaps he bought a non European F6s?

Yes, it's possible.  The "..Menu>Activities & Apps>(select an outdoor GPS activity like Hike or Run)>Hike Settings>Map>Configure Maps, then scroll through the maps that are installed..." I described earlier should reveal what's going on.  If they do have a non-Europe 6S then they probably ought to send it back to where it came from and demand a replacement 6S that is the correct region.  If that's not possible, then buying the Europe TopoActive maps from Garmin is an option (comes with DEM) or use a free map (doesn't come with DEM) or pay for third party maps like talkytoaster or similar (that come with DEM for a minimal extra fee).

It was showing several updates required, including the TopoActive Europe 2020.20, which I installed, taking an hour and a half. Is now showing N & S America,  Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Pacific. I won't bother worth any of these. 

BaseCamp is still loading the Topoactive map from my watch, how 2 hours in and still only 50% loaded. 

N & S America,  Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Pacific are golf maps.

This is the initial loading of the maps from the Fenix to BaseCamp, this can take 4-5 hours (as it is building a cache/index of the map tiles that make up each map). Once done it is faster next time you connect the Fenix to BaseCamp (unless the map has been updated, then it will re-initialise/index the map again)... The non-European maps are just golf maps, so of limited use, unless you like "a good walk spoilt" ;-)

As also mentioned the Garmin TopoActive maps supplied on the European models do NOT have contours, only the North America and APAC ones do (for maps of the regions supplied on those models).

Oh, that's useful to know. I gave up in the end,thinking it would never load, but maybe I should leave it on overnight to see if it loads. Shame the Europe map doesn't have contours, but I guess a watch is never going to replace a map. 

Actually I regularly spoil a good walk, two or three times a week, but don't need the overseas golf maps!

Garmin TopoActive maps are just OpenStreetMap data and IMO not as good as 3rd party options. I also find it astonishing that Garmin segments these maps by region and doesn’t make worldwide maps available to all their customers of the f6 pro and Marq. It’s free and open source map data so it’s just nickel and diming people who bought premium GPS watches.

If you are in Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, or Germany check out https://openfeitsmap.nl. They have very detailed maps particularly for the BeNeLux region with 5m TOPO lines and also Germany at high resolution. They also have maps for all of Europe as well with 25m TOPO lines.

Another good source for Europe is https://opentopomap.org.

https://gmaptool.eu has excellent maps for North America, South America, and Africa.

These are all free and open source.

https://talkytoaster.me.uk has enhanced maps for the U.K., Europe and other places both free of charge and by subscription depending on the level of detail.

brian.reiter said:

Garmin TopoActive maps are just OpenStreetMap data and IMO not as good as 3rd party options

Yes and no.  The base data is open street maps (Talkytoaster maps are the same), but Garmin do add a popularity routing layer to their maps, that other OSM based maps won't have.  So Garmin isn't just flogging stuff that's available for free elsewhere as a premium option.  That said, the popularity routing is based upon data from millions of Garmin users uploading activities to Connect; so arguably Garmin are flogging data we give them for free back to us .