EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing: ex·o·ter·ic
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3. Of or relating to the outside; external.

After I bought my Garmin eTrex Vista Cx I was stymied by the need to borrow a PC in order to download the maps. Not willing to give up just yet (I am an engineer. I should be able to figure this out!) I found a couple of clues that lead me to a successful download of new map data to the microSD flash memory card from the PowerBook via Virtual PC and the USB connection.

I'm running Virtual PC for Mac 6.1 and Windows XP on the PowerBook G4 (MacOS X 10.3.9).

• Shut down the Virtual PC if you have it running.
• Select the Windows XP (Not Running) from the Virtual PC List window.
• Select "Settings..."
• Select "USB" and then select "Enable USB". This only has to be set up once. For some reason the default is to disable USB devices except for the native keyboard/mouse.
• Start Up Virtual PC and get Windows XP running again.
• Start the MapSource program.
• Turn on the GPS and connect it to the PowerBook with the USB cable.
• On the GPS unit go to the Main Menu, Select "Setup".
• From the Setup Menu select "Interface". You should see on the Interface Setup page that the USB is Connected. Scroll down to the USB Mass Storage button and select it.

Windows XP should find the new hardware connected and alert you. This doesn't appear to always be the case.

If it doesn't find the GPS as a storage device, then select the USB icon from the virtual PC task bar at the bottom of the screen and enable the "Unknown USB device". MacOS will complain here that the removal of the device mounted from Finder wasn't properly shut down. Click OK and ignore.

The GPS is now in Mass Storage mode and the flash memory is mounted from Windows as drive E:.

In MapSource, select the maps for your mapset, then click the Send To Device icon. The GPS should appear as Removable Disk (E:\). Select Send to transfer your mapset. When the Transfer is complete you can power off the GPS to unmount the device.

I also set up the GPS to store Tracks to the flash memory. From Windows Explorer, you can copy the *.gpx files stored on the flash memory card over to the Network Drive that is actually the Macintosh Hard Drive. This allows you to access them from the Mac. You can also access these from the MacOS Finder when the GPS is in Mass Storage mode and is mounted.

Next step is to see how many maps I can get on the 2Gb microSD memory card I bought. It should hold all of the US City Maps and most of the Topo's for the Southwestern US.