I'm just getting acquainted with my Meridian Platinum. It works fine with Streets and Trips 2002. The Meridians can output NMEA data in three different revisions, and at several different speeds. You'll need to set it to NMEA 2.0 and 4800 baud for most mapping software to be happy.
I also bought MapSend Topo for Meridian. It has all of the streets, as well as elevation stuff.
I questioned the value of the compass and altimeter in the Platinum, but now that I've used it, I like it a lot. Because you get direction info even when not moving, I can stop for a moment and let it get a solid location fix. Then just slowly turn until the desired point is straight ahead and walk the distance to the waypoint. As might be expected, however, the compass does not work well in the car.
Rick WØYGH Belton, MO
N 38°49.370 W 094°33.150