Garmin BirdsEye Satellite Imagery

[rediguana]

Wow - this looks pretty darn cool and affordable - Garmin BirdsEye Satellite Imagery. Haven't tried it yet, and would be interested to find out more about coverage. Be pretty cool if it is the whole world

Must dash - GPS units to work on for Chile

[rediguana]

Should be in bed. But just have to experiment with the trial imagery. Currently downloading about 20MB of sat imagery from BirdsEye to install in BaseCamp. This looks like it is made of massive win... tick tock...

[rediguana]

Wish it would hurry up and download Next question while I wait is - will the image overlay have an inbuilt terrain model? E.g. if the imagery I'm currently downloading from Wellington contains DEM info, then it will be possible to utilise the 3D view at last...

It's like Christmas...

[GSVNoFixedAbode]

Wait... WHAT? Birdseye data for New Zealand?

[kiwitonita]

From the Garmin BirdsEye Features list:

# Allows you to layer the Garmin vector maps on your handheld (such as TOPO 100K, TOPO 24K or City Navigator®) with BirdsEye Satellite Imagery for a real-life view of roads, buildings and terrain.

Notice BlueChart is not mentioned. Will it work with 3rd party topo maps or just Garmin brand maps?

At US$30 per year per GPS I'm not game to experiment just yet. There's useful looking posts on the Garmin Forums here: Garmin Forum: BaseCamp.

[rediguana]

I've got a free demo tile of Wellington (Evans Bay actually) installed on mine last night. It looks pretty nice. Will try and get a screenshot up ASAP. It looks really good. Just shown it to a couple of other people, and they were impressed too. I'm sold

[rediguana]

This is what I got on my unit early this morning after load a demo tile. This is a high quality tile, you can go higher to highest quality. So it should be possible to get even better imagery in the third image. Maps are NZ Open GPS. But basically, I really like, and this will make an awesome caching tool

[kiwitonita]

Many thanks Gavin - looks great. You really are a long, long way away!

[rediguana]

No - in Wellington. My GPS just hasn't had a fix since Australia Neither have I

Here is some additional info and a video from one of Garmin's blogs.

[rediguana]

Will it work with 3rd party topo maps or just Garmin brand maps?

Tony - I think what you're referring to here is utilising the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) built into the topo maps to create a 3D view? Note that a DEM is quite distinct from having topographic contours, and a lot of topographic maps don't contain the DEM required to produce the 3D view. I imagine that the 3D view would work with Garmin's Australia Topo product, but unlikely to with the AU+NZ City Navigator 2010 (unless Garmin built the DEM into that map as well).

[radionut50]

... and affordable

.. hmm my reaction was $US30 per YEAR per GPS! What!

I have also dabbled with a demo load, and it looks OK, but much the same as the custom map I set up from a Google Earth aerial photo view... That works well, and is free, but is rather fiddly to set up, and I have been able to set up very small areas only.

We own two GPS, so paying $US60 per year is not attractive.

[rediguana]

... and affordable

.. hmm my reaction was $US30 per YEAR per GPS! What!

How many GC.com memberships do you have currently?

That works well, and is free, but is rather fiddly to set up, and I have been able to set up very small areas only.

Yeah, the integration into BaseCamp and automatic loading is quite nice, although it is a little slow to download larges areas of High/Highest resolution imagery. BaseCamp does make it trivial to load imagery, and it does use a different mechanism to Custom Maps, and appears to support much more imagery than a Custom Map.

One of the low-res areas I loaded tonight is about 10-15km x 20-25km in size. So works quite well on larger areas that I think Custom Maps would struggle will. Custom Maps are very much designed for small geographic areas.

For example, I'm currently loading imagery for an upcoming trip, and I've got three JNX files in the BirdsEye folder on the GPS of 3.2MB, 10.6MB and 40.1MB. So they are packaged nicely into single files on the unit for easy transfer - a bit like vector map IMG files.

The only real downside is the locking of imagery to a single GPS, but the price isn't unreasonable - c.f. gc.com membership, less than a fuel tank of gas etc. Sure, they all add up, but I'm fast liking this addition to the GPS

And since the maps are locked to the unit, I guess you have to sell them with the unit, so they may also marginally increase the resale value. The downloaded images continue to work when the subscription runs out - so I believe. The subscription only buys continual online access

[radionut50]

I guess so.. in fact this is probably the best argument that the cost is not great:

.... less than a fuel tank of gas etc.

.. after all , how many of them have gone into this hobby!

[rediguana]

I guess so.. in fact this is probably the best argument that the cost is not great... after all , how many of them have gone into this hobby!

In fact, one could possibly make the argument that improved imagery in a GPS may increase fuel efficiency as it might be easier to identify the best route to a cache which can't otherwise be determined by the vector maps

[radionut50]

Yeek.. I took the plunge, stepped through the garmin menus... selected one Download purchase into my cart, (at stated SUS 29.99). It then jumped to "delivery address" stating they needed to know that to decide whether tax was to be paid, having filled out that correctly, it immediately converted the purchase to AUD at $39.00, no tax.

My calcuator says $29.99 US = $32.48 Australian today - so what is the $A 6.50 for??

Whatever I do, I don't seem to be able to buy in $US.

How much did you pay Gavin? And how?