UTM grid on OSM

I recently bought a Garmin GPSMAP 66s on which I’m using OSM’s.
Are there any electronic GPS maps (e.g. from Belgium) on which a grid (UTM interests me the most) is shown?
This would be interesting for hikers who want to use a compass (instead the GPS) and would be able to print parts of maps for that purpose. Topographic maps are very expensive and to cover a bigger area costs immediately a lot of money.
Maybe for the future OSM cards?

If you were in North America you could use CalTopo https://caltopo.com/map.html for generating geo referenced PDFs with UTM grids that can be used in apps like Avenza Maps https://www.avenza.com. I find that a very nice combination for backcountry navigation.

But they don’t seem to have landcover and elevation data for your part of the world. And, for that matter, where they have contour lines they are on the old US standard of 40 foot intervals which is a bit different than the 10 meter you might be used to.

There is OpenTopoMap https://opentopomap.org/ but I think that is only for online display. I don’t see a way of downloading that to a off line device, etc.

I have generated grid overlays (OSGB36) for use on Garmins, but a long time ago. Here’s a quick overview of what I did:

  1. Generate shape files of the grid. I did this in PostGIS, as it’s easy to write a single SQL query which will generate either lots of grid ‘squares’ or grid lines, and exported as a shapefile. The key thing I wanted was that grid squares (such as SK53, my user name) had names.

  2. Convert the shape file to an OSM file: ogr2ogr or just JOSM will do the job. You will need at least one key=value pair describing the gridlines squares. I happen to use the following attributes: grid_size (in m), eastings of orgin, northings of origin, name. Grid_size allows rules to show the grid at different scales.

  3. Write a custom mkgmap style for processing the grid. Essentially you need to choose a garmin feature code which displays as you prefer & write (a) rule(s) to associate which tags cause a grid line or square to be assigned to the feature class. I styled the feature classes with custom colours (basically different coloured dotted & dashed lines).

  4. Create a gmapsupp.img file using mkgmap. Ensure it is transparent, the usual hassle of choosing a suitable family id is still true here.

  5. Either combine with the base gmapsupp using mkgmap & place on your garmin, or use MapSetToolkit to add information to your windows registry so that it can be read in BaseCamp or MapSource. (Note if the source is large you may want to tile it with splitter).

I may have some old examples of style files etc, which if I have time will see if I can look out.

It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly as steps 1 & 2 only need be done once, but does need some familiarity with mkgmap.

Bedankt voor deze uitleg. Ik kan me redelijk uit de slag trekken met PC maar dit gaat me jammer genoeg als informaticaleek mijn petje te boven. Toch een grote merci om dit alles neer te pennen. :slight_smile:

OSM uses projection that suits global positioning. UTM projections are not like that. Those target specific areas to get best match to surface.

Any decent cartographic program has option to reproject map. So if you need to print map in different projection, you load it in such program, change to projection you need and use it that way. There is no need to change projection of the source map.

What programs you might use? There are number of commercial applications but I guess QGIS which is free will do.

Pedja, many thanks for this nice info. I’ll look it up.