Customer Reviews

Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The registration really isn't a nightmare - inside the packaging there's a leaflet with a 8 character coupon code. When you run the DVD, make sure you're online, have your Garmin unit plugged in and powered on, choose to get a 25 character unlock code, enter the 8 character coupon code when prompted and away you go.

As for getting maps onto the Garmin unit, what I did was,

- Run the MapSource program (either runs automatically or it'll be in the Windows Start menu under "Garmin"). Yes, it's not pretty but it does the job.
- Select the whole map of Europe. Use the map select tool (a button on the MapSource toolbar that looks like a polygon with a yellow glow) and drag over the whole image of Europe. Storing all of the maps requires about 1400MB total. You can also select/de-select sub-regions of the map.
- Choose the menu option. "Transfer->Send to device". Now, you have a choice of storing maps in your unit's internal memory (appear in the list as a "nuvi" device) or an SD card that you might have in the unit (appears as a separate device in the list, something like "H:"). My unit had maps of North America pre-installed when I bought it. When I tried to transfer the maps of Europe to the internal memory, it told me that I had only about 500MB-ish available. So, I transferred the maps to the 4GB SD card instead.
- Go watch that episode of "The Wire" that you've been meaning to get round to. Indexing and downloading takes a while.
- You're done! It's really not bad at all - just accept that if you want to store maps in the unit's internal memory, there's a limited amount of space available so you'll probably just want to store the countries that you're travelling to. Otherwise, get a nice SD card (you should check the Garmin website to see if your unit can take 4GB SD cards, or only up to 2GB) and put the maps on there.

The reason you are thinking of this product is a trip to Europe. You purchased a Garmin GPS with only the NA maps on it. And now you want to navigate Europe during your next vacation. Well, this is the exactly right software to buy. The detail Garmin gives for Europe is absolutely stunning. In major cities every single street in existence is here. The maps will get you where you need to go, even those hidden treasures. Remember, European cities don't change all that much over the years. It's the highways leading in and out that change - but that little bistro in Paris, the great pasta in Rome, the awesome reindeer in Stockholm, that pub you love in London - they haven't moved for years, their address is still the same. So yes, go ahead and buy this software. It's expensive, obscenely expensive - but you will never get lost.

August 2, 2009 Update: Lane Assistance DOES NOT work with this map set. I have this loaded on a Garmin Nuvi 765T which does lane assistance in NA. During this trip to France, nowhere did lane assistance appear (Paris would have been the most likely or the French highway system - never showed up once). There is also no 3D data for those lovely sort of 3D buildings you get in major NA cities. A tip for anyone using this in Paris - drive slowly, have a good idea of where you are going before you drive, and expect a lot of recalculating - new streets come up very very fast. Its easy to miss those streets. Nuvi does a graceful job of recalculating your trip. One last tip - use google maps to search for your destination, once found use the "Send" function in the map balloon to send that location to your GPS (it works like magic).

Oh but the install. Watch out. No it's not a nightmare, but it is not intuitive.
1) If you have a low priced Garmin that does have an SD slot - consider buying an inexpensive 1 or 2Gb SD card. Simple enough and will set you back no more than twenty dollars. That will mean you will never run out of storage space for the maps. Performance will be identical to the unit memory or the SD card. So spring for an SD card.
2) The current shipping version of this software is City Navigator NT 2010, and yes it is the correct version. The list price on Amazon is different from the list price at Garmin (so you might think this is the wrong software). Amazon offers a really good discount over the Garmin site. Take advantage.
3)Install:

a)The program on the DVD installs a program called Mapsource on your computer. Once the install has happened, no sofware was put on your Garmin yet.

b)The next step is to run MapInstall (you'll have to chase after that in your start menu under Garmin). The first thing it will tell you, Navigator Europe NT is locked. Plug in your GPS and wait until windos says the unit is conencted. Click on the "unlock on line." Your browser should find your GPS. You then enter the serial number from your GPS (it's on the GPS label right in front of you) and the Letter Number code from the back of the DVD package. Then click on Unlock. On the website, you will get a message that the maps are unlocked.

c) Next Step is where all h e double hockey sticks can break loose. If you are lucky and Garmin isn't monkeying with their website, the software will unlock and all will be good. Back at MapInstall, click OK, and the software will be unlocked. If you have the bad luck I did, the software will remain locked. One hour on hold and two support people later, the software support person walked me through the MyGarmin Website to find the Unlock Code number. If this happens to you - go to MyGarmin, log in, click on the MyMaps tab. Find your GPS, click on Details. Now a very detailed window will open, and the 25 digit unlock code will be listed for Europe NT. Copy that code into memory. Now run Mapsource, a pop up window will appear indicating that Europe is locked. Click on Skip. Then go to the Utilities menu, click on Manage Maps. Then click on the Unlock Regions tab. Now this is the fun part (not intuitive at all), click on Add, then in the pop up window paste your 25 digit unlock code here (that code is not the product key). Click OK, OK... and voila, your Europe NT map is now unlocked and you can proceed with the next step. Fun eh?

d) Now that your Europe map is unlocked - run MapInstall. More than likely you will see a very ugly map of Europe in a square. Just click on the upper left corner outside the square and drag down to the lower right corner to highlight all the region maps available. Make sure your GPS is plugged in your comptuer. Then click to send the maps to the GPS. Depending on your computer the map index build may take a long time or 5 minutes on a very fast quad core. Then the maps will transfer to your GPS, takes about 15 minutes.

Does all this sound intuitive? No. Not at all. Is it a pain in the rear, yes you betcha. Garmin really needs to improve the whole updating Nuvis. The software they are using is very very old - I used this many years ago to load maps onto an eMap where memory was outrageously expensive and extremely limited (before a trip I could only load the region I was travelling in). With cheap unlimited memory, this should be simpler now.

These maps are beautiful, have great detail, and will get you where you need to go in Europe. If only the install could be more intuitive.

Oh, now that you own this software, you'll probably also want to buy the NuMaps Lifetime for Europe and North America (this is lifetime of the device updates to the maps). If you already own NuMaps NA (Garmin nüMaps Lifetime North America Map Updates for detailed maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico- write to Garmin, they might offer you a reduced price to upgrade that subscription to include Europe, they made a tasty offer to me.

July 8, 2009 Update - type nuvi tips and tricks into your favorite search engine. The first hit is a resource on how to better use your Nuvi. It's a fantastic site with hundreds of tips.

After updating firmware and the built-in US maps on my Garmin Nuvi, I expected this DVD-ROM to be a matter of firing up an install utility that connects to the nuvi and...ZAP...puts all the roads of Europe on it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that at all.

First off, the DVD-ROM is Windows only. Blah. I'll forgive that, but it's not even a particularly friendly Windows program. To use it, you have to go through some bologna on-line to use the code that comes in the packaging and then register on [...] and then get another code that activates a license for just one Garmin GPS. Annoying.

The next step, after surviving the copy protection and activation nonsense, is to fire up what appears to be the world's most pathetic PC mapping software, reminiscent of a Windows 3.1 application ported from DOS: few menu options and even fewer that are truly intuitive. Apparently what you need to do here is select the regions of Europe you want to load on your Garmin and then download them, bearing in mind that there is a finite amount of free space on your GPS and, apparently, not enough free space to hold all the roads of Europe...bummer.

Selecting the regions isn't what you'd expect, either. You can't just click on France and load all of its roads; there are a bunch of different regions of France, each of which must be clicked individually. You can't even just get Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport in one region. Central Paris is one region and CDG is in another. While you're at it, you probably should select a few more regions, like La Defense and all the adjacent regions to central Paris, because, heaven forbid, you decide to drive outside central Paris and not have the roads 10 miles outside of the city center loaded. Once you're done trying your best to guess every conceivable place you might drive in Europe (without choosing too many...remember, you only have so much space!) you can download all the maps to your GPS.

Once you actually *get* the maps on the GPS, it works pretty much how you'd expect. In Ireland, the thing paid for itself in spades, finding these little single-lane roads up the side of the mountain you'd swear was a driveway and not an honest road, but, it turns out, is the only way to get from here to there. The only operational oddity I could detect is that the already long boot time of my Nuvi appears to be even longer. Perhaps that's another reason not to load the whole continent.

For me, I love my Nuvi because I am away from home more days a year than I am home and it is handy to know I have maps to get me from anywhere to anywhere when I land in unfamiliar territory at 2 AM. I had hoped this map upgrade would give me that freedom for both North America and Europe, but, alas, that is not the case. I have North America and the subset of regions of Europe I thought I might be going to some time soon. I hope I don't get diverted to Frankfurt, though, without having preloaded the maps ahead of time.

This is a good buy since updates are relatively inexpensive (about $70). If you get the same data on flash memory instead of the CD you can't update it, it must be replaced. Uploading the data from CD to the Garmin Nuvi could use a little more explanation to ease the process initially.

We purchased Garmin City Navigator Europe (v. 2011.10, for our Nuvi 265wt) for a 2 ½ week vacation covering Venice, Tuscany, Amalfi Coast and Rome. Overall, we're glad we did, and especially in the Cortona region of Tuscany where our rented villa was located, it was a godsend. But the whole experience was not without its frustrations.

DVD vs MicroSD
If I had to do this over again, I would have gone for the MicroSD card. I initially found the multiple purchased options (download, SD, DVD) confusing, given that each offers different flexibilities in terms of mapping routes, loading to the device, upgrading maps, etc. I decided on DVD for the greatest flexibility (and concern about the SD card popping out accidentally and losing our maps).

Well, I ordered it on July 3, 2010, and it did not arrive until August 15. That's 6 weeks, and Customer Service could only tell me "it's back ordered". Could be that I was waiting for the first 2011 version (a good thing I guess), but the Garmin website and tech support were both equally unhelpful in setting expectations or explaining delay.

Then began the hellacious installation process. I am a computer professional and work on PCs and software every day. I could not get the software to install, and the error message was totally unhelpful. The FAQs were useless, so that triggered several emails over a couple of days that came back with unhelpful "scripted answers". Then finally, *on a weekday only*, came the 2 hours on the phone with tech support. The good news is that they did finally get the software and maps installed, but only after manually working around hidden requirements not found anywhere on the Garmin site. What Garmin doesn't tell you: the installer looks for 5GB free space on your C: drive (even though the maps, once installed, only take 2.3 GB); failing that it simply declares an error and exits. It took a savvy tech support person webexed into my computer to get around the inflexible and uninformative installer to install the maps on a disk partition that had the required space.

One of the advantages of the DVD version is the ability to use the MapSource software to create routes and then download them to your device or an SD card, along with selected maps. Well be prepared to spend some time figuring out how to use this very unintuitive MapSource software. I did, finally, manage to create some routes just before departing for Italy - but in the hurry to download them and the maps to my device, they somehow never made it. Could very well have been pilot error - so, again, be prepared to spend time making friends with this puppy.

Maps
The maps and detail overall were very good - with one major exception: Venice. Not surprising I guess, Venice being a walking city with no cars. But wait - our Nuvi265 has pedestrian mode, which I hoped to use to find recommended restaurants, or closest route back to our hotel over a limited number of canal bridges. Forget that and arm yourself with good paper maps of Venice.

Then came out drive from Venice to Tuscany's Cortona area. Ultimately, it got us there, but...

...it was completely lost getting us from the Venice Marco Polo airport to the A4 (the main route south). As we followed the very clear street signs, Garmin claimed we were "off the map" for about 15 minutes, until we actually got onto the A4

...going around cities (Padova, Firenze), the directions name way too many segments with names that do not correspond to signage, and key ramps/exits are not called out soon enough (we accidentally missed ramps/exits twice in our trip, costing frustration and lost time).

As I said, it did get us to the remote village of Montanare, but our trust in "Allie" was diminished, and we felt we had to continually cross-check her against paper maps.

It got us to the Amalfi Coast, but only after we programmed Salerno as a waypoint to avoid a shortcut on smaller roads that we felt would be hard to follow on the rainy day we drove south.

It got us hopelessly lost trying to find Mt. Vesuvius Park as a POI. My bad for not spending time the day before we left Amalfi to cross-check its route against paper maps! My wife got sick of hearing "...recalculating..." as we tried to find our way out of the tiny, congested, one-way streets of Boscoreale where it took us to instead of to the Park. (We finally bailed on seeing Vesuvius from the volcano itself).

It did get us to our hotel in Fiumicino and to the airport where we dropped off our car. (We did not use pedestrian mode in Rome and did fine with paper maps).

In general, that "last mile" problem was continually the sticking point - "Allie" insists on giving you "12 rights and bear lefts" on unnamed roads when 3 with the "common use" road names would have reduced confusion and increased confidence.

Lessons Learned
If I had to do this over, I would either have purchased the SD version (reviews of that product are generally much better), or I would have planned much more time awaiting DVD, installing, learning MapSource, transferring routes, etc.

I would also have purchased more paper maps with more detail of all the cities/areas we visited so as to be able to cross-check the Garmin more confidently.

I also *definitely* would spend more time *the day before* a drive, programming and cross-checking Allie's routes.

And one lesson for Garmin: Take the feedback I gave customer service and (a) puts more details about the software, map version, product availability and installation requirements on your website, and (b) improve the installer to let the user decide where to install the MapSource software and the disk-gobbling maps!

Loading Maps on a Nuvi 360 and misc tricks.....

The software install itself was not too bad with my version, CN Europe NT 2010.10. I updated this software on the Garmin site with the unit plugged into the computer as well. BUT, the adding maps feature was dinosaur age, IMHO.

Here is yet another install guide with a few tricks:

If you want all of Europe, plug card reader with a 2 GB SD card into the computer. You need the external card to accommodate all of the Europe maps, as the internal memory does not have the space. Launch Mapsource.

With the Europe map set to least magnification (1000 miles), select the map select icon, and then click just inside the map square. This will allow you to select all of Europe in one swoop. Move the cursor around and you will see all the regions light up. No more selecting and adding one by one ! Mapsource told me that there were 264 maps total.

Next, choose "Transfer" then, "send to device". Walk away for a half hour or so and it should be mostly loaded depending on your computer............... You choose the SD card removable drive when prompted to store all the maps.......

To double check that the data has been transferred, check the contents of the SD card under "my computer". You should see a gmapsupp.img file that is 1.6 GB or so. Then put your SD card into your Nuvi, and reboot it. To double check that the new maps are being read off the SD card, go to: tools>map>map info. You should see CN Europe in there.......................Then check to see if you can navigate to some country........

If you do not want all of Europe, then plug your Nuvi into the computer and select the countries you want one by one or using the technique above. Hopefully, there will be enough internal memory to accommodate your selections. If not, delete the new gmapsupp.img file that represents the partial list of maps, so the unit does not get confused when you plug in the maps loaded on the SD card. Then buy a 2 GB memory card and do the aforementioned install.

To free up some space for maps in the internal memory, you plug your Nuvi into the computer and open up the Nuvi icon. In there you can find folders with jpeg images that you can delete and voices in languages that you can delete. I personally replaced the Garmin images with my own images. To review the images you loaded, this feature can be selected under tools>display>splash screen. It will give you a choice of images from SD card or from internal memory.......you can show people pictures of your family or whatever, or you can make your boot screen a selected picture.............

I hope this helps fellow Nuvi owners!

I used this with a Garmin Colorado 400t GPS, in The Netherlands (Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft).

The Windows software, as many people have pointed out, doesn't have a great interface, but it mostly gets the job done. It does seem to have some bugs: it looks like it will install things in C:\, even if you specify a different location.

The maps seemed to work really well for the cities I was in. In fact, I didn't really see any problem with the actual maps. We covered a decent amount of territory walking and riding trams and trains, and it seemed to match well.

I did notice two problems. The first is that street numbers didn't always match up so well -- I think what may have happened is that the software marks the location of specific numbers, and then interpolates between them (address 200 is at this intersection, and 300 is the next intersection, so it assumes that 250 is right in the middle -- but sometimes it's not). The second problem was that it seems like doesn't have information about many business names. City Navigator North America always seems to do a good job with this: if I search for a business by name, it always finds here; here, there were many businesses, hotels, restaurants, and museums that I could only navigate to by entering their street address manually.

Overall, though, it worked great; it made it much easier for us to figure out where we were, and how to get where we needed to go. We ended up spending less time arguing over maps, and more time at the places we wanted to visit.

If you need the mapping software ON YOUR PC also, then this is the one you want -- not the SD card with the pre-loaded maps.

I like the MapSource program that comes with the DVD, so that I can sync waypoints from my laptop to my Garmin before I travel. It's much easier than entering addresses from the Garmin's on-screen keyboard. Plus I can double-check the routes before hopping in the car.

You'll need a 2GB blank SD card to store the European maps, since the Garmin doesn't have enough room when other maps (e.g., North America) are already loaded in the internal memory.

Don't worry too much about reviews that say it is difficult to install the DVD maps to the Garmin. It does take some time (30-45 minutes), but for me it was worth the advantage of getting the the MapSource program.

Purchased this CD for geocaching in Spain, Portugal and Gibraltar while on tour. Maps were detailed and accurate.

Caveat - can only be used on Garmin GPS units with supplimental memory chips, otherwise excellent!

We bought Garmin's City Navigator (a confusing name since it covers the road system as well as city streets) Europe NT chip for our Garmin 255W in August '10 for our use in Europe in Sept '10. The chip was advertised as being the most up-to-date chip available. We used it with our 255 in Germany, Austria, Slovania, Croatia, and Italy. The unit worked relatively well as long as we stayed on the freeways, however on portions of the autobahn in former East Germany that was rebuilt at least 10 years ago, the unit got "lost" on several occasions, telling us to turn around and go back, or to make left or right turns onto non-existent roads. In like manner, the directions it gave to long-existent towns and within towns and cities along Croatia's northern coast and northern Italy were often totally wrong. Had we followed the Nuvi directions we would have wound up driving in circles and becoming totally lost. We wound up relying on road maps and using the Nuvi as a back-up rather than the other way around. Garmin should review the Europe chip accuracy and up-grade their Europe chips as soon as possible. In the meantime should reduce the price they charge and suggest using a road map in conjunction with the Nuvi until they are able to vouch for the accuracy of their product.