Garmin adds sat/aerial imagery

[robertlipe]

Garmin let you add your own raster imagery to many of the devices some ago. As I mentioned in my earlier article, it's cute for small areas but a real pain for large areas. Now Garmin is offering a $30 (annual) set of canned imagery.

http://gpstracklog.com/2010/01/more-on- ... agery.html

It's nto clear yet if at the end of a year if the imagery quits working or if you just can no longer download more.

[Sduck]

For 30$ I just might shell out for some more cuteness. For once garmin's got the right price on something like this.

[robertlipe]

While $30 is in my toy budget, I still have mixed reactions to it. About the only thing that imagery adds to my hunting is "is that collection of a dozen caches in a quarter mile circle a mall or an East Fork-like substance? Locally, I kind of know that Opryland is urban-ish and East Fork isn't. When I'm traveling, it's interesting but if I took the time to download aerials before going, I'd have probably just looked at them on a Real Computer before going. Decent maps will tell you if a cluster is in a mall. Even the best imagery will tell you only that the woods are the woods.

I have a PN-40 that offers similar features at a similar cost and have never bothered. Perhaps I"m just all cranky and old school. "Back in the old days, when GC#'s were in roman numerals and paperless caching involved clay tablets, we didn't have satellite imagery. We hiked to caches in the snow - uphill - both ways - and we liked it. Oh, and quit riding your bikes through my yard."

[Sduck]

I went ahead and bought a subscription to Birdseye. It's brand new, and still experiencing some early teething pains, like too many users clogging the servers, but my initial experience has been positive. And it's just as I mentioned earlier, some pretty useless eye candy. I can envision some good uses for it though - for instance, trying to get through Maryland Farms during rush hour via parking lots and alleys - I've used google maps on my iphone for that, but it's slow - this would work better.

[robertlipe]

This type of service almost always has launch blues. The first week they're open, they have little idea how much traffic to expect and all new purchasers are going to immediately load their devices with many gigabytes worth of downloads. If you don't have experience in launching web services at that kind of scale, you're going to get beaten up.

What's your impression of image size? 16GB cards are cheap [ reference: http://dealnews.com/memory/prices/micro ... /16GB.html ] 32s have only been shipping a few days and are, uuuh, not cheap. Can you fit enough imagery to be useful on a card and still have your City Nav data on it?

[Sduck]

Lets see. I have a 4gb card. City Nav NA takes up 1.3 gb. The birdseye imagery I downloaded last night is about 350 mb, and that's about the limit for a single download at the medium resolution. I'm going to try some additional tests, but so far size isn't really much of an issue.