Leia este artigo em português.

This post explains how to obtain a complete map of Brazil for Garmin GPS. If you are planning to travel to Brazil and you plan to bring your Garmin GPS, this post is probably useful. In my opinion Garmin is the best GPS option anywhere in the world, but Brazilian maps are not very complete. Just a few points of interest exist. For example, at Belo horizonte (my city) I cannot find most banks or malls, etc.

Fortunately there’s a project called Projeto TrackSource (site in Portuguese only). This project is a community that provides complete maps for Brazil. It contains gas stations, banks, supermarkets, movie theaters and anything else you can imagine. With TrackSource your Garmin GPS turns into a very complete and much more useful tool than that with original maps. Leaving my home for example there’s a dead end street. With the original maps it always says me to get this street as if I had a flying car. After installing TrackSource this part of street is not there anymore as expected.

I would like to encourage folks that are using TrackSource to give a donation. After testing of course :). The project is totally free and there’s a link in the main page to give a donation. As a contribution I gave R$ 20,00 through the link on the site, created this page and posted on twitter, stumbleupon and other applications to help spreading the project, what’s is not too much if compared to the benefits that trackSource offers. When we help a project like this we are giving a vote for the technology development of our country. Doing this, we are encouraging professionals of very high quality to provide new technologies by a fair price.

The equipment used in this example was the Garmin nüvi 205. I believe these steps are going to work with any other recent GPS equipment from Garmin.

Let’s go to the business. Remember that you must have the Garmin software installed on your computer before doing the steps. (You will have to navigate under a Portuguese page, not a big deal haha)

1. Go to the download page (página de downloads) of the site and download TRC-Brasil clicking the button Mapsource (for windows) or Mapinstall (for Mac).
2. Run the installation file you just downloaded: TRC-Brasil_v0912.exe.
3. Run the program Garmin/MapSource.
4. In the dropdown at top left select TRC-Brasil and click the icon “Map Tool” as you can see in this snapshot:
   
5. Using selection tool, select the entire Brazil map, like this:
6. Now plug your device and click Transfer->Send to Device. This will take sometime.
7. When you’re done unplug the device and wait until it restarts. You’re done.

Now turn on your GPS and check things you know in Brazil, like cities or banks (Banco do Brasil) or whatever you want. You will notice the difference between original maps and TrackSource maps.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 4:46 pm and is filed under articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.