Author Topic: Anyone used car based Garmin in Mexico?  (Read 1295 times)

Anyone used car based Garmin in Mexico?
« on: 25 January, 2019, 07:28:15 am »
This is an odd, specific issue that I have no great expectation of resolving but curious if anyone has used road GPS in mexico.

The question: Does the road GPS location search work as expected in Mexico?

The background: Mrs Ham & I are off to Mexico in a few weeks, we'll be hiring a car and touring. The car I've booked may or may not have satnav in (the stated model has, most other models in that category won't) so I'm planning alternatives. SatNav in Mexico looks critical to avoid those areas tourists should, well, avoid. Historically I've used my Oregon in furrn parts, which is a good stopgap but lacks anything worth having for destination search. In NZ, I ended up (very quickly) buying another car GPS (Nuvi) which proved its worth, especially as I was piloting a 7m van.

Examining my brace of nuvi (a twovinuvi?), they both have SD card slots. Looking at the file structure, it seems the familiar garmin setup, so I  thought me to try out adding a routable map as I'm used to doing for the Oregon.

The newer NZ one was a no-go, but the older UK one worked. Deep joy! no question I have routable map. And, I can search for and find some places. OK, let's try postcodes. that's no good, I can only see codes in the 50-59000 bracket. That sounds ODD, let's investigate. OK, that's because the 50k codes are linked to Mexico state. Entering Oaxaca as the state gives me their postcodes. Only, the database of streets doesn't seem to be complete either. Hmmm, is this because it's Openstreetmap? Let's see if I can find a <cough> better map....yes, for North America. Search for anywhere in USA works as expected. Mexico has the same "features".

I suspect the way out is either to suck it up and buy the official map (which installs on the unit memory, not as gmapsupp), or use a phone with Maps.me, but I wondered if anyone has direct experience.

Feanor

  • It's mostly downhill from here.
Re: Anyone used car based Garmin in Mexico?
« Reply #1 on: 25 January, 2019, 11:06:36 am »
This sounds like a Unicode issue.

City Navigator maps come in Unicode and non-unicode versions, and some models of unit don't support Unicode, I think.
Not sure about the OSM maps.

Or something like that.

Re: Anyone used car based Garmin in Mexico?
« Reply #2 on: 27 January, 2019, 10:24:18 am »
As best I can work out, it works as in the USA in that it treats a state as a country. Then, if I manage to find a full fat map (which I have done now) it all works. The clue was in the file size, some 300Mb only, now 1.5Gb.