
If you love driving with your Garmin nuvi, you will also love hiking with it. All you need to do is upload topo maps to your nuvi and you will be ready for back country hiking and camping.
Several Garmin Nuvi navigation receivers will allow you to include additional topographic records to improve their use in backpacking as well as various other circumstances. Begin with your available choice of various additional maps available from a Garmin vendor. I will work with Garmin MapSource Topo U. S. in this example.
Start out simply by installing the MapSource application on your computer. Once you have your program mounted and working, you can zoom into the area you would like. Pick the polygon tool on the toolbar at the top of the window, and then click on the chart sections you wish to upload to your Nuvi. It's also possible to click on and move to choose bigger sections, such as complete states.

Shaded Area Selected For Upload
Right after selecting the region you want in order to include, you will see a region highlighted in light red. For this document I've selected Wyoming, Colorado, and part of western Nebraska. The exact quantity of records you can include depends on the quantity of ram you've got in your Nuvi.
At this point you will be prepared to include your data to the Nuvi. Connect your Nuvi to the laptop or computer by using the USB cable which came with it and, if necessary, the driver in order to install. Select your Send To Device image in your toolbar in order to bring up a dialog box which should find the Nuvi. The Nuvi should appear immediately with the Unit window. Otherwise, click on Find Device as well as use the pull down to choose the unit. Be certain Maps is ticked with the What To Send section of your dialog box, and then click Send. Subject to the size of the spot you selected, it could take several minutes to generate the include file and move it over the Nuvi.

Nuvi Map Set Selection Page
Turn on the Nuvi. Before you head to your gps mode, pick Tools > Settings > myMaps. According to the type of Nuvi you've got and just what you've got loaded, you will see your topo maps you just uploaded and the usual foundation maps. Click on your check marks in order to deselect all other than the topo charts. They will be called by the name of the topographic maps you uploaded.

Example Topo Data on a nuvi
Once you get your topo map set selected, return in order to the main get started up page and click on View Map. At this point you'll have topo data on your Nuvi.
If you want to return to the built in map set, just go back to your myMaps window and reselect all of the built in maps for display.
This process should function essentially the very same for other Garmin devices, also, for example the Garmin Rino and GPSMAP line. It'll work for the majority of the portable aviation products, but not for the panel mount systems.
That is it for now. Enjoy the extra functionality loading topo data will give the Nuvi, whether you are driving and also outdoor recreation in some out of the way place.
From an interview of Bill Standerfer of Avionics Specialists
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Installing Garmin Nuvi Topo Map Files - Links