Another Garmin thread

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davidej

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I have a 2008 year Garmin GPSMap 3010 plotter and have just discovered garmin have discontinued the supply of their proprietary chart chips for these. I am hoping to go to the Baltic next year and am left with either buying a new plotter or relying on the ipad navionics set-up.

Searching the web, I find you can buy readers for the proprietary chips. So, if you are clever enough, I assume you could transfer the data from the later SD card charts to a blank chip (which are also available).

Has any one done this or got any suggestions how to go about it?

I don't suppose anyone has a chip for sale -will advertise on sale & wanted.
 
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I doubt it, the later SD card charts are a completely different format... This isn't much different to chart suppliers that used to use CF cards etc... stopping upgrades from the CF version to the SD version
 
It has always been possible to download "unofficial" Garmin charts and put them on SD cards, in fact, i've seen them on Ebay. So i'd guess it likely that you could do what you're asking. One problem you may encounter is the size of the newer charts, it may well be that they don't fit on the old cartridge.

Have you actually contacted Garmin though ? It may be that it's possible for them to put new charts on a blank card ?
 
Garmin have not made life easy for those of us with these older plotters which use their proprietary data cards. The card readers do not work in anything newer than Win XP and you also need the older Mapsource software to add maps from the CD onto the card. You are more or less compelled to upgrade to a newer SD system or somehow find someone with a card covering the area you want which by now will be well out of date.
 
PaulRainbow said:
It has always been possible to download "unofficial" Garmin charts and put them on SD cards, in fact, i've seen them on Ebay. So i'd guess it likely that you could do what you're asking. One problem you may encounter is the size of the newer charts, it may well be that they don't fit on the old cartridge.

Have you actually contacted Garmin though ? It may be that it's possible for them to put new charts on a blank card ?
Click to expand...

There are good utilities to put your own charts on a Garmin, but they are definitely mapping geek territory! A good starting point is cGPSmapper - but it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. I hope it's still around - when I tried the web-site a moment ago, it said unavailable, try again soon. First of all, your map has to be in vector format - you can't just scan a map or chart, it has to be digitized into a suitable vector format. That in itself is a pretty time-consuming task. Then you have to annotate it with appropriate codes, then you convert it to Garmin form. It is then non-trivial to upload it to your device!

The same software would probably take a new version of the Garmin charts and reformat it for your older machine, but YMMV.
 
PaulRainbow said:
It has always been possible to download "unofficial" Garmin charts and put them on SD cards, in fact, i've seen them on Ebay. So i'd guess it likely that you could do what you're asking. One problem you may encounter is the size of the newer charts, it may well be that they don't fit on the old cartridge.

Have you actually contacted Garmin though ? It may be that it's possible for them to put new charts on a blank card ?
Click to expand...

Yes, I have. they just say that it is all (chips and software) discontinued and why not buy a new plotter. It is not even certain that if we did that the radar would work. we might just have to buy that as well!!

Planned obsolescence at work.

I have been out to the boat and found that I have a blank chip. The box says

"Stores data from MapSource CD-ROMs so you can make the most of your Garmin GPS"

I might call them again to ask how this works.

If I could borrow a chip with the required charts ( that might be a problem), could I clone it onto the blank chip?
 
You can't clone those data cards as far as I'm aware. You either buy a pre-programmed card whcih will work on any plotter or you buy a blank card then load regions of nav data onto it from the bluechart CD which you 'unlock' by purchasing a code from Garmin; this then becomes locked to your plotter serial no.
 
fwiw,

I've done it to get updated charts on my 3006C. I'm quite handy with computers and general hacking, this job took me over 100h on and off over a winter a couple of years ago.
You do need lots of s/w, you obviously need the card reader (tried even adding a serial socket to the powercable and do it on the plotter didn't work), time to google and read the googling output and some unlocked maps of the area.
Unless you buy (quite expensive!) a 256 or 512MB card, don't bother embarking on that project. Readers are 50-60quid as well!

Bearing in mind that the 3006 and 3010 are EOL, had all sorts of problems with the screen coatings and waterproofing, processors are way slow, features are minimal (need to go on?) I'd say, sell it on and get one with the SD or microSD cards. Check radar compatibility but again the digital ones are (allegedly) much better than the old analogue ones (personally I like that you only have to thread a 2core power and somesort of ethernet cable to them)

cheers

V.
 
vas said:
fwiw,

I've done it to get updated charts on my 3006C. I'm quite handy with computers and general hacking, this job took me over 100h on and off over a winter a couple of years ago.
You do need lots of s/w, you obviously need the card reader (tried even adding a serial socket to the powercable and do it on the plotter didn't work), time to google and read the googling output and some unlocked maps of the area.
Unless you buy (quite expensive!) a 256 or 512MB card, don't bother embarking on that project. Readers are 50-60quid as well!

Bearing in mind that the 3006 and 3010 are EOL, had all sorts of problems with the screen coatings and waterproofing, processors are way slow, features are minimal (need to go on?) I'd say, sell it on and get one with the SD or microSD cards. Check radar compatibility but again the digital ones are (allegedly) much better than the old analogue ones (personally I like that you only have to thread a 2core power and somesort of ethernet cable to them)

cheers

V.
Click to expand...

I'm not at all surprised at your estimate of 100 hours, and that is using existing vectorized charts, I presume. I estimated similar tasks for Antarctica in man-months, though admittedly that was for a product where I was inventing my own symbolization, which isn't necessary for a standard marine chart. The real problem is that often the only way of achieving the result you want is through trial and error - the number of combinations of device model and the various settings in the software is immense. The documentation, though not bad, takes a lot of getting used to - the concepts underlying Garmin mapping are not straightforward, even to a mapping expert. Starting from raster scanned charts would be an order of magnitude worse, but at least the process is pretty much straightforward!
 
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