Garmin SD cards

[Wowbagger]

Is there a maximum capacity to the SD card that will work in the Vista HCx? Mine's 2gb but I was considering emulating the lovely Charlotte, who has a second card with OSM on it.

They seem stupidly cheap. Any reason not to go for 8gb?

[Oaky]

Is there a maximum capacity to the SD card that will work in the Vista HCx? Mine's 2gb but I was considering emulating the lovely Charlotte, who has a second card with OSM on it.

They seem stupidly cheap. Any reason not to go for 8gb?

ISTR that higher capacity (either above 2 or 4 GB, don't remember which) cards are SDHC and won't work in some older devices that only do SD (my ancient PocketPC falls into that category - no idea if the HCx does or not though).

[MercuryKev]

I've got a 4gb card in my new Legend HCX - works fine.

[fuaran]

Make sure you've got the latest firmware - I think support for larger cards was added in a fairly recent version.

[pdm]

The latest HCx software will support the latest SDHC versions of micro SD. My Vista uses 8GB cards without any problems.
However (!) it is very difficult to get Mapsource to load more than about 2G of maps (routable NT type Mapsource maps) onto a card...   
I can fit Europe, South Africa and Australia onto a single card but no more...

[Biggsy]

I don't know about the device in question, but....

The limit for standard SD is 2GB.  SDHC starts at 4GB.  Non SDHC devices tend to work with any card up to 2GB, SDHC-compatible devices tend to work with any card up to 32GB.

[fuaran]

However (!) it is very difficult to get Mapsource to load more than about 2G of maps (routable NT type Mapsource maps) onto a card...   
I can fit Europe, South Africa and Australia onto a single card but no more...

I think most Garmins are limited to 2025 map tiles in a single mapset, which could be your problem.
The size of the map tiles varies between different Garmin map products, so some maps will let you load a larger area before getting to this limit.

[plum]

I found that the more I put on the card the longer it took to boot up. I had a bunch of maps of all sorts and stuck them all on an 8 Gb card just to see what would happen, but it made the hcx so slow I got fed up with it. It's not like you can use more than one map at a time so took it out and replaced it with a 4 Gb card with just the Euro Streetmap on, and there's still loads of space for tracks and other stuff..

[robgul]

I have an 8Gb in mine ...

.... but there's not much point as you appear to only be able to put one filename on it - and most of the Garmin maps are only about 2GB

I did consider using my phone's Windows file manager to swap the filenames around for the one I wanted to use .... but that was too much of a fag so I have (UK, Europe & N America) on separate SD cards.   

As said up-thread you need the latest firmware in the GPS to handle bigger cards

Rob

[Polar Bear]

I load Andy's maps, the whole UK version, directly to my GPS60CSX.  I have a 2gb card in there.  The unzipped gmapsupp.img file is 300mb at present.  Plenty of room left on a 2gb card.

[Kim]

I have the whole of the UK in Andy's OSM maps, Garmin Topo, Metroguide and the SMC contour maps as a single image file to avoid card-juggling.  It's less than 1.4gig, which leaves more than enough room for weeks of point-per-second tracklogs on a 2gig card.

I've had a 4gig card work without issues.  My understanding is that (with newer firmware at least) it isn't fussy about the size of the card.  I think there's some sort of file size limit for the maps, though.

[plum]

I think they're FAT32 formatted, which would fix 4gb as the limit for any individual file.

[Kim]

I think they're FAT32 formatted, which would fix 4gb as the limit for any individual file.

Yeah, but there's some other Garmin-specific limit on the size of the map file, or number of tiles within the map, or size of a map tile or something.  2GB rings a bell.  Whatever it is, it's not likely to be a problem with an area as small as the UK.

[plum]

Sounds plausible, I remember trying to load a US map that was about 3Gb but it wouldn't have it. Didn't know if that was caused by the filesaize or just a broken map.