A little thinking would confirm this. I have 24k maps on my phone, and for the 6 southwest states, they use (coincidentally) about 24G (I keep them on a 32G card). So if we estimate this is 1/5 the area of the continental US, we get 5*24 = 120G of space required for 24K coverage of the entire US. The 66i has 16G internal memory. It doesn't seem like the entire US at 24K would fit on the unit!
The site below is where you would buy the maps (at the price of $100 per region). They break the US into 8 regions, so this could get expensive.
"West" covers CA, NV, OR, WA. "Southwest" covers AZ, UT, CO, NM.
This is severely annoying for me since my main areas of use are AZ and CA (in separate regions). I might cough up the $100 if I could get AZ and CA in the same set, but for $200 I intend to make strenuous efforts to explore other options.
The southwest region requires 4G. The west requires 8G. The other sets to cover the continental US require 4, 4, 4, and 8G, so the entire continental US requires 2*8 + 4*4 = 32G. which will hardly fit into the 16G built into the 66i. Further confirmation that I was misled in believing that the 66i gave me 24K coverage of the entire US.My guess was wrong. The 001 file is just the first part of a gigantic archive. On linux, the 7z command complains about this and notes that this is a "split archive". It took several hours to download the 001 file, so getting all of them will be quit an undertaking -- too bad I can't just download one region, the fact that they advertise the regions then give a split download for the whole kaboodle is perplexing.
When I revisit the page, I notice navagation links for each region on the left and when I visit the page for each region there is a download link at the bottom, so now I am downloading US_Mountain_OSM_Topo_v33.7z which is a 1.5G file. It looks like it will take a few hours to download so it is time to run some errands.
I am doing this on linux (Fedora 33 at this time).
The first thing I do is to stick my Sandisk 32G micro SD card into my card reader. I watch /var/log/messages and note that it shows up as /dev/sdh1. Next I type "fdisk /dev/sdh", then type "p" and I see:
/dev/sdh1 8192 62333951 62325760 29.7G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)So it is formatted FAT32, which is what I want. I mount it and note that it has one directory called JOURNAL with some trash file inside, so I delete that (this looks like a fresh disk I have never used before). So now I do essentially this:
su mount /dev/sdh1 /mnt cd /mnt mkdir Garmin cd /u1/GPS cp US-Tucson.img /mnt/Garmin sync umount /mntThe file US-Tucson.img is a file I obtained from http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl It came to me as 63240015.img and I renamed it to US-Tucson.img, which may be a bad idea. Actually this sort of renaming is recommended in many guides, so it is not a bad idea
Now, into my 66i goes the micro SD card. I power it on, go to the main menu, navigate to map, and the first entry is Configure Maps. I select this and I get a menu which includes "OSM Generic Routable". Clicking enter on it flips a slider up or down (enabled or disabled I guess).
I can also get to this map configuration when the unit is in map display mode by hitting "MENU".
This does work! Tucson is oddly on the boundary between two regions and this has given me the eastern of the two regions. Also I do not have contours -- I did not make the proper selection on garmin.openstreetmap.nl, so I should try again, but this is progress.
Tucson seems to be on the "TopoActive Americas North" selection for the 100K Garmin maps that are preloaded on my device.
I have read misleading comments about Basecamp online -- mostly complaining that Garmin has dropped it. This is not true. The version I just downloaded is dated 5-21-2021, only a few weeks old. Apparently active development was stopped several years ago and Garmin now is "developing" the Explore website again. I view this as a good thing. Basecamp does a great job at what it does and people like it. There is a point in any software product where development needs to stop, otherwise bored developers take it in directions nobody wants it to go. As long as basecamp as it is right now remains available, I will be entirely pleased.
I launch Basecamp. It does label itself as "Basecamp 2D" which apparently mans that OpenGL 1.3 is not working with my video card. My video is via the integrated graphics on my Intel i7 chipset -- so you would think a current driver from Intel would support OpenGL 1.3 and likely it does -- another chore to investigate this and update my video driver.
Basecamp wants to know my "activity profile" and offers Hiking and Mountaineering. It is hard for me to choose between these -- but I chose hiking for now.
Tom's backpacking pages / tom@mmto.org