In Dash Navigation With Topo Maps

[robmict]

Please excuse me if I missed a thread on this, I have searched for this and most posts are a few years old. My question is, is there any current model Kenwood navigation systems you can load the garmin topo maps onto? I want Kenwood because they have the only system that uses Garmin maps, and it would be nice to have an in dash navigation system that would also give you topo maps.

 

[Ark]

I'm not sure if the new models do or not. I was interested in this a couple years ago and called Kenwood. They said that whichever model I was looking at (I think it was the 8120) could definitely display topo maps. Basically you load the map on an SD card from Mapsource and then put it in the SD slot in the Kenwood head unit. If it is one of the head units that is self contained, then you put the SD card into the slot that you can see when the screen is open. If it's one of their remote KNA units then the SD card goes into a slot that's in the side of the KNA box. Once the card is in then you can go through the menus and select which mapset to use.


This was a couple years ago so I don't know if it still applies to the new DNX570HD. It looks like the DNX still has an SD slot for uploading new maps so it likely can support topo maps. Calling Kenwood is probably the best way to go. When I called a few years ago it only took them a few minutes to answer my question. They have a pretty good customer service team.


I'm not sure if you've ever seen a topo map on a Garmin unit that was originally intended for road navigation but they aren't nearly as nice looking as one of Garmin's actual topo gps units. The topo lines tend to be odd colors and the road units don't have nice renderings like shading or 3d views. For me, viewing topo information on something like a Nuvi gets pretty difficult to read, especially while driving. You can obviously do what you want but in my opinion, the best option is to either use a dedicated topo gps with a larger screen, like the Montana, or run your navigation software on a netbook in your glovebox and use your headunit as an external monitor. That's not quite as nice as having a full touchscreen interface in your dash but it does let you get good topographic rendering while still keeping a clean look.


Here are a few older links on this. The second one has a picture of a topo map rendered on a road unit. That's pretty much how those maps turn out on road units. My nuvi look the same.

http://www.fjc-mag.com/october-2008/off-road-navigation-part-3/kenwood-dnx-8120
http://www.fjcruiserforums.com/foru...ectrical/64791-kenwood-dnx7100-topo-maps.html