Satellite Imagery on your Garmin GPS Part I – Birdseye
Anyone who uses a trail GPS whether it be for geocaching or just hiking, probably has loaded their share of maps onto their GPS. One of most requested features for portable GPS’s has been the ability to add satellite images to the GPS so you could navigate an area based on overhead satellite images. Now, of course the quality of the images varies greatly depending on where the images come from, but between Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth, there are some pretty decent satellite images available.
Garmin’s Birdseye Satellite Imagery
Garmin recently released a new product called Birdseye which is a subscription service that allows you to obtain unlimited amounts of satellite imagery that can then be transferred to your Garmin GPS via a software product called Basecamp.
As shown in the screenshot, Basecamp allows you to use the Birdseye option to select an area and download the appropriate satellite imagery. Once all of the images for a selected area have downloaded, you can then right click on the collection of images, and choose to send them to your compatible Garmin GPS. Dakota, Oregon, and Colorado are the only Garmin models that currently support this.
In this screenshot, you can see part of the province of New Brunswick and two little areas that were selected for satellite images. Once the images are fully downloaded, you then can zoom in and look at what level of detail you get.
In this screenshot, you are looking at the satellite image for the Dieppe traffic circle in greater Moncton. Now this is about as zoomed in as you can get before the detail gets really bad. At first glance, it looks ok. But don’t let that deceive you.
There are MAJOR issues with the Garmin Birdseye images and specifically the Basecamp software that is used to manage them. The software is HORRIBLY slow. In fact, it took about 30 seconds to load the software just to get the full high level zoom of NB displayed, and then another 30-45 seconds for it to zoom into this specific location.
The download of each image is also extremely slow, and you are limited to small chunks of 300MB only. This makes selecting even a city the size of Moncton difficult.
Once you get everything downloaded, it then becomes more difficult to get the maps onto your GPS unit. You right click the collection you want (such as the four collections seen in the above screenshot) and then choose to “Send To” your GPS. You never get a prompt or progress of how long it will take or when it is done. It just simply sits there and disks and disks on your computer and you hope that when you disconnect the GPS, the maps are there.
Lastly, the quality of the satellite maps for our area is shabby. A lot of NB’s maps are of very low quality, or are distorted by cloud cover. This apparently is a common problem for many Birdseye users as I have been reading a lot of material from various forums about the issues with international maps on Birdseye.
Ultimately, Birdseye leaves a lot to be desired mainly because of the lack of stable software which manages the maps. Basecamp is SO incredibly slow that it makes using the Birdseye feature virtually impossible. In my last attempt at using Birdseye, I tagged part of Moncton to download and then let my computer sit overnight. Upon getting up in the morning, I checked the status and the download had stopped about halfway through. Basecamp still thought it was downloading but nothing was happening. I restarted the application and resumed the download. When I came home from work that day, it had finished. I then “sent” the maps to my GPS but since I have no prompt or indicator telling me how long it would take, I waited and checked it in the morning.
No surprise when I got up and there was still no message telling me it had finished. I unplugged the GPS, tried it out and got an error telling me I had an invalid Birdseye file, but yet the maps were loaded. When I looked at the map to see what the satellite images looked like for my street, I found I couldn’t even see my street because of the cloud cover.
For $30/year, I consider it a lost cause. I will go back to Birdseye in 6 months and see if things have improved. Unless something is done to either fix Basecamp’s inherent stability issues, or they allow Birdseye to work with other software products (like Mapsource), I will stick to the alternate satellite image solutions I have found.
To read part II of this series of posts, click here.