Garmins Mapsource City Navigator Australia v5 night colour scheme on a GPSmap 276C
These mapping products are designed to be downloaded to Garmin mapping GPS receivers and will also work as moving map products on WinNT, Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2000 or WinXP platforms (with Garmin GPS receivers that have an unlock code loaded).
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City Navigator Australia 2008 expected available September 2007 |
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City Navigator Australia v7 available August 2006; CNA details on Garmins site Similar rural coverage to CNA v6. Has additions, such as Sydneys M7 Motorway, and minor corrections. Minor home businesses removed from POI (good). Size now 139 MB. Levels at which minor roads display has changed; with v6 you could see minor roads at up to 1.5km zoom level and now with v7 they disappear after 700m. This is a problem in rural areas as many of the roads are only minor and when you zoom in to see them only a small area is displayed on the screen. Definitely a step backwards. Upgrade if you need M7 otherwise review your options. Australian price AU$269 at Johnny Appleseed or AU$249 at C H Smith |
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City Navigator Australia v6 available 20 May 2005; Minor rural towns, secondary rural roads and a reasonable coverage of dirt tracks added. Coverage is now similar to MetroGuide but with corrections and additional POI. At 132 MB a larger data card may be required to load all of Australia. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade. |
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City Navigator Australia v5 available 31 March 2004; About 120-130 additional rural towns added. Additional POI added. Mapping data is 35% larger than CNA v4, but 15% less than MetroGuide v4. At 60.4 MB it fits on existing 64 MB data cards. Motorcyclists and 4WDers will still have to add MetroGuide to get the rural coverage they need. |
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City Navigator Australia v4 (first version) available 13 June 2002; This product has excellent metropolitan area street mapping but only highways in rural areas and main streets in provincial towns. If you want 'turn by turn' auto-routing then this is it. Requires functionality on GPS receiver to support it (supported by SP2610, GPSmap 276C/296, GPSmap76C/76CS, GPSmap 60C/60CS, GPSmap 196, SPIII and GPS V). Maps will work on most other GPS receivers but without auto-routing. |
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MetroGuide Australia v6 (second version) available April 2006; MGA details on Garmins site This product has identical mapping to CNA v6 but this product does NOT perform auto-routing. Australian price AU$159 at Johnny Appleseed or AU$176 at C H Smith. |
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MetroGuide Australia v4 (first version) available 18 October 2002; This product has identical metropolitan area mapping to CNA but much better rural mapping (than CNA v4 or v5) including secondary roads, streets in many provincial towns and a reasonable coverage of dirt tracks. This product does NOT perform auto-routing. |
- Find function - both mapsets have a very useful find function that lets you locate addresses, cities, points of interest, waypoints etc
- Most auto-routing GPS receivers in Australia (including inbuilt vehicle units) use mapping data from a single supplier
- Sensis (owned by Telstra) is the vendor of the mapping data for both products. Sensis sourced the original maps from UBD.
- Mapping coverage;
- - City Navigator Australia has street level coverage of all cities, major and minor rural towns, main
highways, secondary rural roads and a reasonable coverage of dirt tracks.
- MetroGuide Australia has similar coverage to CNA but without auto-routing.
- WorldMap is not recommended.
- OZtopo topographical mapping has recently become available (non-Garmin product)
- City Navigator Australia will perform auto-routing on both the GPS receiver and PC.
MetroGuide Australia will not auto-route on either.
- Both City Navigator and MetroGuide come with an unlock code for the whole of Australia.
- Other Garmin GPS receiver loadable maps
- Which units ?
- The waypoint, route and track features of Mapsource will work with most of
Garmins GPS receivers except the older GPS100 and panel mount aviation
receivers. However, the Map features are only compatible with GPS receivers
that have internal ID codes installed.
City Navigator Australia and MetroGuide Australia maps will work with most GPS receivers with internal ID codes. However, they are not compatible with the older StreetPilot, StreetPilot Colormap, GPS12Map and GPS III+ because of the lack of this internal ID code.
- Pacific BlueCharts are also available
- - coverage here and C H Smith pricing here