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Outdoor Maps +

C.sco
over 1 year ago

This thread is about the new Maps + feature available for the Fenix 7 / Epix 2 series.

My plan is to keep this OP updated with new information as we learn more.

I've already purchased a Maps+ subscription ($50/year), and played with it a little. Here's what I know so far:

  1. Maps+ is a US-only feature currently. No idea if Garmin plans to roll out other countries / regions in the future, or when that might be, but currently if you are not in the US, or don't spend any time in the US, then you can ignore this thread and the new Maps + feature.
  2. The maps can be downloaded with up to 6 different layer types, with things such as private land boundaries, satellite imagery (similar to the now-defunct Birdseye Imagery), and other advanced layer types
  3. You can decide which layers you want at the time of download, so you can omit certain unneeded layers to reduce the download and storage size.
  4. You can toggle layers on and off in each activity's settings.
  5. You can download everything (including the satellite imagery) directly from the Map Manager app on the watch! No need for clunky Basecamp software. Unfortunately, the watch is currently the ONLY place to download Maps+ stuff, there is no integration with Garmin Express, Connect, or anything else yet.
  6. You must have touchscreen turned on in order to change the region location/size you want to download.
  7. There is a size limit on each download, though it's not clear what it is. Sometimes I can download like 100 square miles at once, other times it won't let me download more than 9 square miles. As far as I can tell, there's no way to know how big of a region you can download until you get a "map size limit exceeded" error. For the most part, it always fails when I select a region at larger than 3-mile map scale.
  8. The plan can only be used by one compatible Garmin device but can be transferred to other Garmin devices.
  9. The satellite imagery works better than Birdseye - even though it pretty much looks the same, the watch does a better job of rendering it quickly, and it also is viewable at ALL zoom levels! Classic birdseye imagery only showed up at certain zoom levels, and was often slow to render.
  10. It's a bit buggy currently. For example, the size estimates are all over the place. It'll tell me it's 2.5GB for a small 1 square mile area, and then if I zoom out to 100 square miles it estimates 150mb. From what I can tell, the size estimate is not reliable at all, you kinda just have to download it first and then see what size it ended up. Also I've experienced a couple watch crashes while playing with the Maps+ in map manager, and while turning on and off layers in an activity.
  11. Some map layers (parcel, public lands, hunting units, etc) appear to download the entire state regardless of the size of the region you highlighted. For example, I only downloaded a small region around my house, but when I turn on the Public Lands layer it shows that layer for the entire state. I suspect that when you download multiple regions, it downloads a copy of that entire layer for the entire state, every time, resulting in way more storage space being used than necessary. So it might be best to only download your first region with all the layers turned on, and after than only include 1 or 2 layers (like Satellite imagery) in subsequent region downloads.

Here's a link for product info: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/893561

And a link to the support article: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=eEU6gvM2eX53qJBQD6bkn5&partNumber=010-D2098-00&tab=topics&topFaq=true

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    These are the layers which appear to get downloaded for a very large region (perhaps the entire state, or in some cases maybe the whole country), regardless of the region you select. So don't include these map layers in any subsequent downloads after the first one, or else you may end up with a bunch of duplicates taking up a lot of space! (although someone else mentioned that the watch automatically ignores duplicates of these layers, so maybe not?)

    • HMU (Hunting management Units)
    • Parcels
    • Contours
    • Public Lands

    All in all, it's a good start but Garmin definitely needs to do some more work to make it easy to use and better integrated. Some suggestions I have for Garmin:

    1. Make it so you can download the layers separately - what I mean is, let me download just the whole entire file for California Parcels or California Public Land, by itself. And make it more clear what exactly is getting downloaded! For example, when I download just a small region, it seems to download the entire state (or maybe entire country?) for certain layers, but only my selected region for other layers.
    2. Make it so it doesn't try to download the same thing multiple times. Currently if you use default settings, then you'll end up with redundant copies of the same map layers (ie, California Parcels) again and again, one for every little region you download. This results in massive files full of redundant data.
    3. PLEASE lift the size limit for map downloads! It's terribly difficult to download, say, the entire Sierra Nevada region when I'm limited to around 10 square miles at a time.
    4. Make the satellite imagery management easier to understand. When I'm selecting a region to download, I can see my existing (legacy) Birdseye imagery on the map, but I can't see any of the Maps+ satellite imagery I've already downloaded, making it hard to select new regions that don't overlap.
    5. Add some sort of PC or mobile phone Maps+ management. Maybe in Garmin Express, or Connect, or even Basecamp. It's too hard to micromanage dozens (or hundreds) of different maps+ regions and layers using just the watch interface.
    6. Fix some of the bugs - for example, if I turn off certain layers in an activity, they sometimes still show up on the map anyways.
  • 0 over 1 year ago
    C.sco said:
    Some map layers (parcel, public lands, hunting units, etc) appear to download the entire state regardless of the size of the region you highlighted. For example, I only downloaded a small region around my house, but when I turn on the Public Lands layer it shows that layer for the entire state. I suspect that when you download multiple regions, it downloads a copy of that entire layer for the entire state, every time, resulting in way more storage space being used than necessary. So it might be best to only download your first region with all the layers turned on, and after than only include 1 or 2 layers (like Satellite imagery) in subsequent region downloads.

    This is so because USGS Quad Maps and Satellite Imagery are raster maps based on tile sets. So you can download relatively precise area. These are completely based on the former BirdsEye imagery, to the point where they are stored in a directory called BirdsEye on the watch. The remaining four maps (Topo, Parcel, HMU, Public Lands) are vector maps prepackaged from Garmin which are more efficient but much less granular. They are standard .img files in the main directory on the watch, as are all the TopoActive maps. They generally seem to download whole states or, in case of some (public lands) whole US. There's a reference article from Garmin that mentions which maps work in Basecamp and their names and not surprisingly, the ones that work are the prepackaged Garmin vector maps: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=pxV354YS4p50C5Z7S2KUKA.

    For the same reasons, it doesn't seem that downloading vector map multiple times is an issue. The watch is smart enough to know that the map has already been downloaded and it's in the main directory - it even has a consistent name I think, so it won't download it again. I am less sure about raster maps because they are repackaged differently every time. The confusing thing is that the watch still claims the map will take x amount of space, but it won't because it's already downloaded. It might almost be easier if Garmin kept these raster and vector maps separate, because coverage display works quite well for raster maps but prepackaged vector maps are generally much bigger than what you see.

    This is also a reason for somehow unclear size limit on the size of download. There isn't any limit on vector maps, but there is a hard limit on size/number of tiles you can download for raster map. At least for satellite map. It seems that on my watch USGS quad always reports the size of 1MB, but that's a bug.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to jsla7527

    Excellent information, that does help clear up a lot, thank you!

    jsla7527 said:
    The confusing thing is that the watch still claims the map will take x amount of space, but it won't because it's already downloaded.

    Ya that part is confusing to me, as well. It makes it difficult to know whether or not I've actually got space for what I'm about to download (and, presumably, it won't even let me start the download if it thinks it'll be larger than my available space, even if in reality it won't be).

    Ideally it should detect that I've already got the associated .img map for that layer and ignore it.

    I agree that they should separate the raster maps, versus the regional .img maps, versus the whole country .img maps, and make it more clear about how much coverage each of those things actually has. And if you've already got a whole region/country map installed for a particular layer, then it shouldn't keep offering it as a download option anymore (and thus also exclude it from the estimated download size)

    The whole estimated file size thing is a mess... I'll select a small area (maybe 1 sq km) and it'll say 2.1GB, then I zoom out to a larger 10km region and it'll say 1GB. Then zoom out even further and it says 5GB, but pan a little to the left and it says 500MB... lol. They need to fix that, as we have limited storage space on these watches and really need to know how big something is (accurately) before we download it.

    Anyways, your info helps me a lot, thanks again!

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    One interesting thing I noticed about satellite imagery, is that the region you select for download is for the highest-resoolution imagery, but the watch will actually download a larger region of medium-res imagery around that in addition, AND a much larger region around that of low-res imagery. Kind of neat, as classic Birdseye didn't do that (it downloaded all 3 resolutions, but only in a single same-size area). I have no idea how those larger low-res regions work when there are overlaps, but I suspect that (as with classic Birdseye imagery) it probably retains the redundant data and takes up extra space.

    I think it would be best if they separated high, medium, and low res satellite imagery. So you could, for example, download a whole state in low res, and some select smaller regions in medium res, and really important areas in high-res.

    (I'm sure the same is true for the USGS raster map layer as well, but I haven't played with that one as much so I'm not sure)

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Just found that Garmin has a support article for Maps+ on watches now:

    https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=eEU6gvM2eX53qJBQD6bkn5&partNumber=010-D2098-00&tab=topics&topFaq=true

    It doesn't really offer any new information we haven't already figured out, but it might help others who are trying to get it working the first time.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Buyers should be aware that all maps downloaded via Outdoor Maps+ automatically deactivate after the end of that annual plan’s renewal date. The maps will still be on your watch, but Garmin will prevent you from viewing them until you again renew your subscription.

    Thus, it’s a perpetual $50/yr to keep using the Outdoor Maps+ product.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I've been having trouble downloading maps yesterday and today, is anyone else having issues?

    I selected 4 maps to queue in download, plugged the watch in, and it says it's downloading but perpetually sits there at 0%.

    I deleted the first map from the download queue in case that was tripping it up somehow, but even then it still just sits there at 0% indefinitely.

    Rebooted the watch but no change

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to C.sco

    I've ran into the issue with map download getting stuck at 0% before. I am not sure what triggered it, it was on my first download so I thought maybe something hasn't been properly synchronized yet. I eventually deleted the map and went for single, smaller layer and eventually it worked. Could be some combination of layers and size. Would be cool to pinpoint it since then we can report it to Garmin.

    I've tried downloading satellite map just now and it worked fine. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to jsla7527

    Thanks, ya maybe I'll clear it out and try again one at a time.

    I was downloading basically the 4 "global" layers as individual downloads - so a parcel map was one, topo was another, HMU was another, and Public Land was another. The idea being, I could keep those ones separate in map manager, and then only download the satellite imagery layers as needed, as totally separate entities. I think it should make map management a lot easier doing it that way. I just need to get the download to work ;)

    I might skip the Parcel map since, as you mentioned, it's pretty big and doesn't really offer anything other than just property boundaries, without property owner names, so not sure how useful that is.

    I wonder what the Outdoor POI layer is, it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere and isn't mentioned on the OM+ page.

    Edit:

    Nope, no luck. Cleared the queue, rebooted watch, tried download just 1 map with 1 layer (topo), still just sits at 0% forever. Guess I'll try again in a few days

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to C.sco

    There's something more going on. My satellite map download got actually stuck at 50% and stayed there for an hour. I cancelled it, created a new download and it was done in 10 minutes. Seems somehow random, or maybe Garmin is having some issue with their servers (but I believe satellite maps are downloaded directly from Maxar site). 

    We should create a new thread for this and get attention of Garmin people, since this is obviously an annoying issue on a paid product.