understands. This seems to have a fairly active development community. A bug I discovered was fixed quite quickly in a new release. gpsdrive This software seems quite functional, though most of what it is trying to do is done by my GPS already. It can talk directly to many GPSs but I used gpsd for the actual communication, which provides broader support and multiplexes the GPS data so it isn't locked by a single applications. gpsbabel This very powerful comannd-line tool will inter-convert many GPS data formats. Getting Maps on the GPS Since the Garmin GPSMap series will display maps, I wanted to be able to get some mapping data on there. There are two map sources I was interested in: Map data from NZ Open GPS Maps which gives comprehensive coverage of New Zealand, and is free and community maintained, albeit with some annoying uncertainties about the licensing of the data, and it's being tied to Garmin GPSs. Map data from OpenStreetMap.org which gives excellent coverage of many areas of the world, and is free for use under a creative commons license. Using the NZ Open GPS Maps The NZ Open GPS Maps are built specifically for the Garmin GPS, so getting them onto my GPS was relatively simple once I found out the exact command line was remarkably hard. The program that I needed to find to be able to get the maps onto my GPS was sendmap20 which is a free (as in beer) download from the