Base Maps vs. Detailed Maps:
The first thing to understand is what people are talking about when they talk about 'Base Maps' and 'Detailed Maps'. A 'Base Map' is the mapset that is loaded to the GPS units' internal memory at factory level and as such cannot be altered or even deleted. Basemaps come in three regional versions, 'US' basemaps covering the continental United States (these GPS units get shipped directly to the US from the Garmin factory in Taiwan), 'Atlantic' basemaps covering Europe and Africa (these GPS units get shipped directly to the UK) and the 'Pacific' basemaps covering Asia and Australasia (these GPS units get shipped directly to Australia).
South Africa is covered under the 'Atlantic' basemap.
It must be remembered that Garmin units only have a limited amount of internal memory to use for these basemaps. It is no wonder then that the basemaps (especially of South Africa - a relatively small market for Garmin) are so sparse, with very little detail, and are also very inaccurate.
'Detailed Maps' on the other hand are highly accurate maps, which drill down to residential street level details of the major towns and cities around the country.
'Detailed Map' CD's are included with every map enabled Garmin GPS unit sold by an authorized dealer in South Africa.
Detailed Map Options for South African GPS users:
Garmap SA Streetmaps covers the whole of South Africa including over 450 000km of national and regional roads (accurate to a scale of 1:50 000), drills down to residential street level detail of 250 of our cities, major and secondary and includes an extensive POI (Point Of Interest). Ideal for the inner city user, traveling sales rep or businessman and of course the casual holidaymaker making the annual trek down to the coast.
The Garmap Africa Road Atlas offering is more suited to the off-road and 4x4 crowd with coverage of Southern African countries from South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland all the way up to and including Kenya (excluding the DRC and Angola) but without the residential street level detail.
The Garmap South African Topographic and Recreational maps contains the South African 1:50 000 Topographic Data (contours, roads, rivers etc) combined with Cadastral Data (Farms and Farm portions) as well as their own in-house data. This mapset is also non-Autoroutable but has got search capabilities on specified features.
International Maps:
International maps that are available for purchase from South Africa are:
(1). City Navigator USA
(2). City Navigator Australia
(3). City Navigator Europe
(4). City Navigator, Middle East
Aviation Databases and Nautical Charts:
Aviation: Garmin also specialize in producing Aviation GPS units, which have various features critical to pilots around the world. A large part of these features are based on their aviation databases, the 'Jeppesen Database' and the 'Obstacle Database'.
The Jeppesen database contains the general aviation data (NavData) used by pilots (Airports, VORs, NDBs, SUAs, etc.) while the obstacle database contains the locations of towers, tall buildings, and other vertical obstructions that could be a potential source of hazard to pilots. The obstacle database is currently only available for a U.S. coverage region, which contains obstacles within the U.S. and limited coverage of the Pacific, Caribbean, Canada, Mexico, and Bahamas. Thus, only the Jeppesen database is of any use to South African Pilots.
Nautical: Much of Garmin's market has traditionally been the marine market and their marine 'BlueCharts' reflect their dominance and experience. The BlueCharts serve up the best offshore cartography around and work in seamless integration with a wide range of Garmin chart plotters. They even offer limited compatibility with several of the land/marine combo handheld units. Map areas are shaded like paper charts so you can identify intertidal zones, depth contours and more. They are available in Americas, Atlantic, and Pacific versions and offered both on CD and on preprogrammed data cartridges.
African coverage is supplied on the Atlantic version and are divided into three regions, namely:
Eastern Africa - covering Northern Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia & Madagascar.
South Africa - covering Southern Angola, Namibia, South Africa & Southern Mozambique.
Western Africa - covering Northern Namibia right up to and including Morocco.
Map Software and other Garmin map tools on your PC:
MapSource is a map viewing program used to view the maps and is bundled with all the Garmin maps. Garmap SA Streetmaps (a South African product) is also bundled with the MapSource program ensuring compatibility with Garmin products.
When the MapSource program is loaded to your PC or notebook, all the Garmin compatible maps that you load will automatically be saved into this program and can be chosen from a drop down menu list within the MapSource program. Once your maps are loaded, unlocked to your GPS unit and you have written down all the unlock codes (or saved them on your PC somewhere) you can load the MapSource program (and the individual map products) to as many PC's or notebook's as you wish using the unlock codes that you have saved / written down.
This means that you can have a fully functional (PC based) map software program on your work PC, home PC and Laptop / Notebook. PLEASE NOTE: that the maps themselves can be transferred between any of the PC's but only to the specific GPS unit that they were unlocked to.
Trip & Waypoint Manager is a trip planning CD is designed for use with Garmin units that have no built-in map detail or city point database, such as the eTrex (basic) series, GPS 72, GPS 76, GPS 60 Mono, Geko 201 and Geko 301. With this simple, affordable CD, you get the benefit of being able to create waypoints and routes on your PC and then download them to your unit. You can also transfer waypoints, routes and tracks from your outing back to your PC for recall at a later date. You will not be able to download map detail to any Garmin GPS using this product.
A Note on GPS Map Software for Generic GPS units, Cellphones and PDA's:
HandyMap: A problem that most cellphone and PDA users face is the fact that most of the GPS manufacturers (in fact all of the major ones) produce maps for their specific brand units only, and these maps cannot be used with any other brand of GPS unit. [The unfortunate part of this is that the smaller manufacturers are all based in Europe or the USA and they do not produce maps of South Africa].
The only generic map software (worth looking at) that is available in South Africa at this stage for Cellphones and Pocket PC PDA's paired with the smaller brand Bluetooth GPS units, are the HandyMap map products. This software will work with the Holux, Socket, Pretec etc Bluetooth GPS brands but not with the Garmin Bluetooth (GPS 10 series) units. | 
