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OSM Garmin Maps for Macedonia
Thursday, 12 November 2009

This page is part of the cartography project we started in May 2009 with an OSM workshop in Kruševo. Its primary aim is to provide easily downloadable up-to-date OSM maps to the Kruševo project team, which they can download directly into their Garmin eTrex Legend Cx devices.  But of course, if my map files are also useful to anyone else, this is even better Smile

Until we have found a good public source for downloadable OSM Garmin map for Macedonia, I will create such map files myself from time to time, depending on the mapping activity in Macedonia and my time available.

The maps on this page are all in the gmapsupp.img format, so they can be downloaded, renamed to gmapsupp.img if they have a different name and uploaded to the x:\Garmin of the Garmin device, resp. of its microSD card.

The region covered by the maps is determined by a lat/log rectangle covering the latitues roughly from 40 to 43 degrees North and the longitudes from 20 to 24 degrees East, which means that the map extends down to Thessalonikki in the South, Sofia in the Northwest and also covers Kosova and the estern part of Albania.

Since the Garmin GPS devices only reliably supports ASCII characters, the names used from the OSM data are  processed as follow:  Firstly, the name tags are accessed in the order name:en, int_name, name, using the first name tag found.  As this name can still contain non-ascii characters (cyrillic characters or accented characters like š,ž,č), these names are transliterated into standard ascii.  This should make most names inside Macedonia at least readable on the Garmin GPS.

Having read Ivan's encouraging news about the routability of the Macedonian OSM network, starting 2009-07-24 I am now building the map files with the routing feature activated.  This means that -- in principle -- the maps can be used for navigation. However, at the time being I consider this highly experimental and only to be used for testing purposes.  So please don't blame me, if you end up stuck in the woods using the navigation feature of your Garmin GPS with these maps! Laughing

The first type of maps contains simply the OSM data for Macedonia and neighboring regions, created with the mkgmap tool. They are relatively small, so they can be easily downloaded and even fit into the internal flash memory of those Garmin mapping devices that don't support removable extension cards:

Here is the latest gmapsupp.img version of the standard map (no contour lines):

gmapsupp-mk-20161124.img (69'607'424 bytes, based on OSM data from 2016-11-24, using mkgmap r2314 and explicit uppercase conversion)

 All previous versions of the standard map files are archived here .

The second type of map is a topological map containing, in addition to the OSM map data, also contour lines with a spacing of 20m.  These were generated with srtm2osm and use elevation data from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Note that this file is quite a bit larger than the one with just the OSM map.  The file actually contains two separate maps which can individually be "shown" or "hidden" in the "Map setup" menu of the eTrex.  For this, go to the map display, push the "menu" button , select "Map setup", go to the "(i)" tab,  push again the "menu" button, and select the desired "show" or "hide" map operation. The mapset with the contour lines is called "topo-mk", the map with OSM data "mk-YYMMDD"

Here is the latest gmapsupp.img version of the OSM+topo map:

gmapsupp-mk-topo-20161124.img (142'465'264 bytes, based on OSM data from 2016-11-24, using mkgmap r2314 and explicit uppercase conversion)

Most of the previous versions of the topo map files are archived here .

 If you have any question about the use or the making of these maps, you can contact me via This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or as OSM user Enif .

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P.S.: Some technical notes about my map files, for those who are interested in the details:

 

 

 

 
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