NZ Open GPS Routing Maps with your Garmin Edge 705 – as easy as cut and paste!

The Garmin Edge 705 is a great device. Although I ordered mine through a New Zealand Garmin dealer, it only came with Pacific Highway base map set. The screen wasn’t nearly as riveting as I knew it could be! A quick look for the an upgrade micro-SD card, with pre-loaded Garmin City Navigator maps, but at NZ$195 I quickly lost interest. I am already the proud owner of over 200 printed, 260 series New Zealand topographical maps so I didn't want to purchase the same information all over again! As we all so often do in this, the Information Age, I turned to my good friend Mr Google.

In New Zealand we are truly blessed to have the New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project. This project produces an electronic map set including routing information for navigating New Zealand roads. This is also updated very frequently, so changes due to new roading projects appear very quickly. So, don’t be shy about downloading updates to the “gmapsupp.img” file at regular intervals in the future.

To add all the streets in New Zealand and support Navman style, turn-by-turn directions and navigation features:

1. Purchase a micro-SD card. Note, this is a micro-SD. Do not purchase a micro-SDHC card. While these are the exact same dimensions and will fit snuggly in your Garmin device, it will not be able to read from it. Here is one I purchased from Dick Smith Electronics at lunch time.
   [Note: Subsequent to this original post, firmware verion 2.90 was released with support for SDHC cards]
   
2. Insert the Micro-SD Card. It lives in the slot at the bottom, underside of your Garmin Edge 705. [Please excuse camera phone blur and lighting effects – there is nothing folding over in the right-hand side]
3. Connect to your Garmin Edge 705 to your PC, via the USB data cable.
4. Two new driver letters will appear in My Computer, in the example below the internal Garmin memory is set as drive I:, and the micro-SD card is set as drive letter J:.
5. Create a new folder on your micro-SD card, name it “Garmin”
6. In your favoured web-browser visit http://www.nzopengps.org/public/Direct%20gmapsupp/. This is a data file for Garmin GPS’s pre-built by the New Zealand Open GPS Maps Project. Download the compressed .zip file containing it. In this case “20090619 gmapsupp.zip”
7. Open your downloaded file, and copy and paste the data file to the Garmin folder that was created in step 5.
8. You now have the 35Mb “gmapsupp.img” file on your Garmin Edge 705 (yay). This is Garmin speak, for supplementary map. Your Garmin Edge 705 will automatically look for the file when starting up.
9. Now disconnect your Garmin Edge 705 from your computer. It is best to use the windows safely remove hardware icon to ensure all data has been written to your device first. 
10. So now, instead of only seeing motorways and cities like this:You can see all the suburbs….The streets… And find useful things, like an ATM… A wonderful new world of navigation possibilities is all yours…

See Also: Get more detail with the NZ Open GPS Project