Some cars have a satnav called Becker Map Pilot. Somewhere in it’s name there also appears “Harman”. It’s unclear to me if they’re related to the audio equipment manufacturer.

Anyhoo, recently, I wanted to update the maps, having not done so for the past 3+ years. Time has really flown by, but USB continues to be an occasionally painful experience, and Becker doesn’t make it as easy as it should be to update the maps in 2018.

To start with, it was a pain to lay my hands on a mini-B USB cable (can’t blame them for that one). Once that was sorted, I discovered that the Content Manager Software doesn’t work on a Mac. No problem, I thought. Easy enough to lay my hands on a Windows machine.

If you want to update the Becker map pilot, you need the Content Manager software. When you google “becker content manager download”, you’re led to a link which gives you the wrong software. It installs and pretends to be searching, but it will never detect your module because your module is not compatible with this version (version 7).

If you install the Content manager software that shows up as a CDROM drive when you plug your module (lots of flakiness just getting this to detect and stay detected as mass storage in Windows 10), you will find out that it is unable to connect to any of the online services you need (the web store in particular). As the years have rolled by, SSL 3.0 has become obsolete, and Becker turned off support for this protocol on their website, and this leaves old versions unusable.

Download Becker Content Manager Version 6

Lucky for you, you can get yourself the Correct Becker Content Manager which uses a more modern version of SSL and can thus connect to the web store: https://www.beckermappilot.com/contentmanager/Setup.exe 

If you use a mac and wish to try (I didn’t test): https://www.beckermappilot.com/contentmanager/BeckerContentManager.dmg

You can select which version to download by yourself: https://www.beckermappilot.com/contentmanager/

USB Detection Issues

Getting a reliable USB connection was difficult and tedious in my experience. I found in most cases that if you reboot your computer (I used Windows 10), and clicked the Reset button on the Map Pilot Module before plugging it back in, you had higher chances of getting the device recognised correctly. Then you launch the content manager and perform your tasks.

If the Unit keeps dropping it’s connection and disappearing from the file explorer, chances are high that the battery is no longer able to hold a charge. You may wish to consider replacing it (and charging it fully before trying to re-sync). As far as I know, you can only charge it by driving around for a few hours, which for me means a few days of commuting. With a newer battery, the connection was stable long enough to synchronise the Europe 2018 maps in one go.