I finally received my GPS unit, a Garmin eTrex Legend, last Friday, and have been having fun using it this weekend. The coolest thing I have found is that it records “Tracks”, which are the routes that you have taken. You can then upload the tracks to the software on the PC and save them there. I guess I am a geek about it, but I find it very interesting to map out the routes we have taken. It’s neat to see the route we took to go to breakfast, then after that, to the park, and then to the market, and then back home. When I expand the map, I can see that the route I like to take to the market isn’t necessarily the best way, at least distance-wise.

My only gripe about the software is that it doesn’t merge data nicely between the GPS unit and the PC. I haven’t figured out a way to keep all the tracks from different days in a single file. And the GPS unit keeps waypoint data stored in a different format. It is fine to create routes and waypoints on the PC, then download them to the GPS. But if you upload them back to the PC, the data is “truncated”, and it overwrites some custom data that the PC makes use of, but the GPS doesn’t, such as custom icons and waypoint descriptions. Maybe the newer software fixes that. In the meantime, when I upload data, I just select Tracks, but it creates a new file, not merging it with my normal file. So I just save that to a file named tracks_20051024.mps so they keep in order.