My Garmin Zumo 550 has a new lease on life.
Released in October, 2006 with what probably seemed like a generous 1.2 GB of internal memory, the Zumo 550 soon lost the capacity to hold a constantly expanding complete North America map database, forcing users to choose the region they planned to travel when they needed to update.
As time went by, the larger regions became unavailable in the update software, until last fall when I needed to update to a region with Indiana mapping, I found the only region available to me was Canada and parts of the U.S. border states. While in Arkansas, I had the SE U.S. region installed, but when I got back to Indiana I found it only had rudimentary mapping for the Hoosier state. It didn't even show Ind. 75, which connects Interstate 74 with Thorntown and had no street level details of the town.
I'd heard that it is possible to increase the map capacity by loading maps onto an SD card and inserting it into the Zumo. I asked for guidance on the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America member forum and, as the photo demonstrates, I can now access all of the lower 48 states.
This comes as a great relief, because I was afraid I was going to have to spend some serious money to replace the Zumo 550. I am loathe to do that because I have it set up with the SiriusXM satellite radio option and the newer models don't offer satellite radio. Dumping the Zumo 550 would require a complete re-thinking of my motorcycle navigation and entertainment setup.
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