Garmin makes an excellent program called 'MapSource' (currently at version 4.06), which they supply free when you purchase any of their cartographic data on CD format.

You can use MapSource on its own, as a stand-alone PC application, and view maps, create waypoints, and create routes with it. How much you can do is governed by how much cartographic software you have purchased.

You can also use MapSource to transfer maps, waypoints, track logs, and routes to and from most Garmin GPS units (I believe this includes almost all of the GPS receivers Garmin have made in the last 3 years, anyway).

What kind of software you would want for your PC depends a lot on the amount of RAM memory your GPS receiver has. Until about 2 years ago, most GPSR's shipped with only one meg or so of memory. This didn't allow for uploading of much map information - users were pretty much restricted to whatever basemap was burned into the EPROM of the GPSR at the time it was manufactured.

The newer GPSR's being sold today by Garmin come with a removable memory chip (about the size of a small chocolate) that can be up to 128 MB in size. As a rough rule of thumb, you need 1 MB to store a complete load of street level data, including street numbers and autorouting data, for each million people living in the area (1 MB = 1 million people population).

If you have an older GPSR that has limited memory, you would probably be better off using a shareware application for waypoint management. There are quite a few available. If you have not yet purchased a GPSR, then consider getting one that has the largest chip you can afford, especially if you plan to do international travel or if you live in a heavily populated country.

Two good sources of information are Garmin themselves, and Joe Mehaffey's Website. For information specific to GPS software, try GPSy

[This message has been edited by PanEuropean (edited 04 January 2002).]