I've done four river trips. Two with the Patrol forum and two where I've led a smaller group into the Klein Letaba - as was the case with this year's one. The biggest issue with the river trip this year is that there is a hell of a lot more water in the Letaba than normal. I entered at the standard entry point, and spent quite a bit of time bundu bashing through reeds and similar, before we were blocked completely by a very large body of water. We decided to backtrack a couple of kilometres exit the river and try to enter it further down. Stopping the convoy at the tar road, we hauled out the trusty 1:50,000 topo maps and worked out more or less how we could get into the river further down. I tried getting satellite images from Google Earth on my phone to get a clearer understanding of where we could enter the river, but the reception was too bad. Our educated guesses on a possible entry point from the paper maps worked well, and we were eventually in the river again. However, my conversation with Kevin prompted me into thinking about how useful it would be to have a satellite overlay on one's GPS for eventualities like this...
Garmin has always provided a paid-for service called "Birds Eye Imagery" which allows one to get this capability on a subscription basis. Googling for it now, it appears as if this service has been discontinued. But, being the tight-fisted, cheap and stingy South African I am, I've never subscribed to it. So I started digging through the Internet to find ways of doing this for free.... And then I cottoned onto this web-page:
https://www.cacheupnb.com/resources/gui ... s-creator/
Basically, using a web application to generate a "Custom Map" for uploading onto a Garmin device which supports Custom maps (mine does). The link to the software, Mobile Atlas Creator (MOBAC) on that page is outdated / incorrect. The actual link is here:
https://mobac.sourceforge.io/
MOBAC is Java-based, so one will need a Java runtime environment as well. You can Google for that.
MOBAC by default does not include the Google Earth satellite imagery tile servers in its configuration, and by default makes use of the Open Street Map project tile servers. This is against the terms of use for OSM, so upon first execution, one is probably not going to see many maps when zooming in as the tiles do not load. To fix this, one can follow the instructions over here:
https://antonishapsas.wordpress.com/201 ... apsources/
Basically, create a file called "google.xml" containing the text on the above-link. Restarting MOBAC and selecting "Google" from the list of map sources now provides access to the Google Earth satellite imagery. Win...
Usage is easy, but settings (especially the zoom level) will need to be customised according to the device you want to use (ie: screen resolution and similar). Simply select the area you're interested in, select the zoom-level, click on "Add Selection" you want and then generate the atlas. One caveat: you cannot have more than 500,000 tiles in a single custom map.
It may take a while for the map to be generated originally as the tiles need to be downloaded from Google. Subsequent runs (where tiles have already been cached locally) are much faster...
To install the map on your device, connect to a computer and copy the KML file generated by MOBAC into the Garmin/CustomMaps folder.
