rmyers

On some newer cars, manufacturers have isolated the power in the cigarette lighter from the ignition surge because so many people are powering devices this way nowadays. But if your car does not have this feature, you can get a high voltage spike into your GPSr which can kill the device or render it inoperative. Rick

As a ham radio operator, I can tell you that it is always a bad idea to have any kind of electrical device that is connected to a cigarette lighter plug on when you start your engine. Many an expensive radio has been damaged by doing this. You need to power off the GPS before starting the engine. Rick

True. The front USB ports are generally not usable for devices that require a powered port. My daughter's IPod will not charge or download from a front USB port, but works fine from a motherboard direct port. Rick

The device in the article has USB ports so fitting a full sized or mini-keyboard(great for field use) is do-able. Rick

Utra-Portable This class of PC looks like it would be quite useful for caching. Full XP machines that are just a bit bigger than a PDA. Still too pricey, but that will change with time. I use an old Palm VII, and it would be nice to be able to skip the synching of data. Rick

Hi Tom, I have a V, but not a Mac, so I may be guessing a bit here, but 3 things come to mind: 1. Have you tried the Auto Detect option when downloading? That should take the guesswork out of the settings on the Mac side. 2. Make certain you have not changed the comm settings on the V. The defaults are listed in the manual. 3. I assume that you are using Mapsource in some kind of Windows compatability mode. Serial communications used to be a problem with compatability software. Perhaps this is still the case. I would Google this sort of problem to determine if perhaps the issue is with the Mac. Rick