And thousands of you every month do the same following these previously published steps. Or, for the European units I have when I travel to the US/Canada, like two weeks ago. I myself often use the freely downloaded variant I describe below (because I live in Europe, but often buy my units in the US). What differs is some of the special sauce Garmin adds atop it (heatmap type data), as well as the exact layers Garmin does or doesn’t display (how it looks, but also things like topographic lines). But here’s the dirty secret: It’s the same underlying map data.įor virtually all of Garmin’s maps included on Edge/Forerunner/Fenix/MARQ series devices, the base map itself is OSM (OpenStreetMap). Meaning that if the 3rd party map data isn’t perfect, it’s not their fault.

They simply note that it’s unsupported (but doesn’t void any warranties or such). Note that while Garmin would prefer you buy the maps from them, they actually go out of their way to allow you to download free maps from 3rd party providers.

Though, spoiler: It’s the exact same steps as below. But these days they do support it on a few units – so we’ll start with that today, and then on Friday I’ll give you the refreshed version for the Garmin Edge Series. Back then Garmin didn’t have any wearables that could do maps.

However, for the sake of cleaning things up (and search optimization), I’m going to refresh both of those posts. Somewhat astoundingly for a tech-specific post, everything I wrote in that post all those years back is still actually correct in terms of steps. Garmin now includes maps for the region you bought it in (such as North America if bought in the US, or Europe if bought within Europe), but they still don’t include any way to freely download maps for other regions (such as going for a trip from the US to Europe). Back then, Garmin didn’t include any meaningfully detailed maps for any Edge devices, you had to buy those separately – often costing $50-$100 per map/region.

Some six years ago I did a post on how to add free maps to your Garmin Edge series device.

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