Originally Posted by
njkayaker
The site DC Rainmaker referred to was broken for a couple of years. It was a bit of a pain because it kinda looked like it worked. The functionality degraded over time (and even kinda came back somewhat for a while). It took people a fair amount of work to get to redirecting the site to something that works. (People even tried to see if they could take over maintaining the site.)
The maintainer dropped off the face of the earth (which was weird). It wouldn't have been so bad if he put up a "closed for business" page.
It's likely that quite a few people where led to the zombie site by DC Rainmaker's article.
The bbike site is great. There are other fine sites too. I strongly favor sites that let you build maps for custom regions since it's less stuff to copy and more convenient to distribute maps to other people on your trip.
It was a bit easier to pick custom regions in the other site (and one could build bigger custom maps, apparently).
You can buy maps from Garmin but that doesn't include updates. I've update OSM before trips. So, being able to get maps based on fairly current data is useful to me.
When I had an Edge 1000 I ended up buying the Garmin Topo series as I was unable to download the topo version of OSM. I desired topo for gravel riding in Vermont and upstate NY. I was subsequently unable to load those Garmin topo maps to my 1030 but then discovered that you can enable topo features on the installed base map on the 1030, so problem solved. I had to download and install OSM maps on my 810 way back as it only came with a very non detailed base map. I used the DC method to get the OSM maps, this was many years ago.