Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 5

This is Part 5 of a multi-part series on creating custom topographic maps for your hand held mapping GPS unit. For previous posts click one of the following:
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 1
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 2
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 3
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 4

---

Creating Custom Topographic Maps
for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 5

Making your map work with Garmin MapSource

Well. I think we have come quite a long way. Let me just do a quick recap of what has happened so far:

1. Obtained the necessary FREE software.
2. Located and downloaded the map data that we needed.
3. Processed the map data. (For topography only)
4. Created the map.

In this post we will complete the following:

1. Convert the map into a Garmin Compatible format.
2. Load our converted map file into MapSource
3. Use MapSource to upload our map to our GPS Unit

Continue reading after the jump to complete your custom map for your hand held GPS unit!

Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 4

This is Part 4 of a multi-part series on creating custom topographic maps for your hand held mapping GPS unit. For previous posts click one of the following:
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 1
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 2
Creating Custom Topographic Maps for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 3

---

Creating Custom Topographic Maps
for your Hand Held GPS Unit - Part 4

Working with GPSMapEdit

In the previous posts we downloaded terrain and water data from the USGS servers (Post #2) and manipulated our terrain data to give us shapefiles containing contour lines at 20', 100' & 200' intervals (Post #3). Now we are going to take those files and assemble them into a .mp map file. (Just a word of warning, this is going to be a rather involved post.) Our goal is to take our downloaded data and assemble it to create something that looks like this:

Now THAT looks like a map!

Continue reading after the jump to start assembling your own map!