We’re not sure on how long Garmin will leave the door open on getting their MapSource for free with no cracks or hacks so you’ll want to do this as soon as you read it.

The first part to getting your Free MapSource is to Download the Training Center.

Once you’ve downloaded the Training Center go ahead and install it on your machine. You can play around with it if you want to but really this is just opening the door into getting what you want for free.

After you have the MapSource Training Center installed you’ll want to Download the Update and install it.

You should now have the full blown and up-to-date MapSource!

First here’s a couple of sites with a lot of maps:

Map Center
Free Garmin GPS Maps

Here’s some more sites with specific location maps.

Australia – Tracks for Australia
Canada – Canadian ‘eh’ Topo Maps
Caribbean – This maps site has maps of Japan, Bermuda and Antarctica too.
China – Yunnan Explorer
Greece – Greece GPS Maps
Morocco – Maps of Morocco
New Zealand – The New Zealand Open GPS project
South America – Argentina and Uruguay with some more countries on the way.

If you don’t have it already you’ll need a utility to help you get your .img files to your Garmin GPS you can download Img2GPS to help you along with that.

Don’t forget that a lot of these projects are all driven by public contribution, if you think you can help the project in some way don’t be too shy to send them an inquiry.

So how can one plan a route to take when there’s no concrete or asphalt pathways (and no navigational map data available either)?

The guys over at GPSies (pronounced Gypsies & meaning vegabond) have made available a conversion utility that will convert between 21 different formats! Now you can plan your route in Google Earth, export it as a KML and then convert the KML to whatever format your device supports! That means that this will be compatible with the different varieties of Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, Trimble and lots of other brands. Not to mention that with Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) you’ll have access to some of the best satellite imagery of the world to make your route.

Wow – Check out what www.GPSies.com has to offer.

Geotagging is a fairly-new, automatic and easy way to keep your digital photos organized. With a GPS enabled camera you can include GPS location information within the Exif data in your pictures. The problem however is that the cameras that have this functionality built in are still very expensive. Pictured on the right is Nikon’s D300 which is a GPS enabled camera. The last time I looked at the price for this camera it was about $1,700 which is a little outside my budget especially since the price doesn’t include any lenses for the camera.

No kidding around the D300 is a beautiful camera and I would love to have one but I still want to be able to eat more than a little bowl of rice every day next month so really I can’t afford one.

Lucky for me (and all the rest of the people on strict budgets) that there are alternative methods to automatically Geotag your digital pictures without burning up the money you’re going to spend on food for the next two months.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is the best deal at about $50 and it comes in two different models.

The water-resistant and non-water-resistant models are the same price so you might as well go for the extra security of having a more rugged model that comes with a cozy rubber-bumper case too.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is compatible with all digital cameras and camera-phones and can actually be used as a PC-GPS as well. It comes with the software that helps you easily create a 3D photo-journey in Google Earth and in Google Maps.

If you’re wondering about accuracy you can be assured this will be as accurate as any other device on the market. It comes with the widely popular SiRF III Chipset that is used in many GPS systems.

Sony says that the GPS-CS1KA GPS Image tracker is compatible with virtually any digital still camera and camcorder. Record the time, date and location to each shot you take. You can use with any of camera since now Picture Motion Browser software is included in GPS-CS1KA. Once the images and data are on your PC, the supplied image tracker software synchronizes the photos with latitude, longitude and time reading from the GPS-CS1KA unit. Activate the Picture Motion Browser software are your photos will pop up next to push pins on Google Maps or Google Earth by the actual location where you shot the picture.

But wait just a second! This is selling for $150 which is about $100 more than the i-gotU model that does exactly the same thing.

Alright – it does have a pretty cool design and also the hook for a carabiner (those ever so popular clips that are used for hiking and now everything else too) which makes it something you can just clip to your backpack and forget about until the journey is over. Your call on whether it’s worth the extra $100 though.

The GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Lite is also a great choice – it’s reasonable priced at about $100 and has all the features you’d expect from a device like this.

They claim that “the most exciting feature of all is that you can upload your photos to flickr online” which you can do with any other picture too! That particular feature is not really unique to any device and if you’ve geotagged your pictures with any other device flickr will treat them the same when you’ve uploaded them.

With a cool design and also the clip for the carabiner you’d think it’d be worth as much as the Sony model. I’m guessing the extra $50 on the Sony is the price you pay for the little painted on Sony logo.

There’s been mention that this GPS device doesn’t live up to the advertised 22+ hours of normal battery usage time but that would be totally dependent on where the device is being used. If it’s always searching for satellites it’ll use up the battery a lot faster than if it has constant locks on them. Even so 10 hours on a rechargeable Li-ion battery would suffice for most users.

So there it all is! Geotagging your digital pictures automatically, cheaply, and easily!

I’m guessing that Sudija uses a motorbike as his main means of transportation and has a GPS device that doesn’t have Bluetooth capabilities. He’s come up with a really simple and ingenious way of modifying his TomTom to give it Bluetooth capability. Now he can cruise around on his motorbike and abide by all those life-saving helmet laws while still comfortably listening to his GPS directions.

You’re going to have to be at least a 4 on the ‘Handy-Scale’ for this one. The project involves taking apart the GPS, drilling a little hole and soldering a couple of wires in. But all in all it is a pretty simple project that can be performed on pretty much any GPS device that has a speaker and gives you audible navigational directions. With a Radio Shack non-Bluetooth cellular phone adaptor he was able to get everything working just fine.

Sudija also says that he saved himself about $300 by being able to have the cheaper GPS device and adding the Bluetooth capabilities himself!

You can find Sudija’s great Instructable all the way over at Instructables.com.

When you’ve found your destination just right click on it and then click Directions to here. The box on the left hand side of the screen will change and include the decimal degrees coordinates for the location that you’re seeking.

You can add the coordinates to your GPS unit and you’re on your way. It might not be as good as a navigational GPS unit but this will still help you get you there.

I’ve picked the Garmin iQue 3600 PDA with built in GPS, the HP iPAQ rx5915 Travel Companion and the Garmin eTrex Venture HC Handheld GPS to compare.

Here the Line-up which is linked to Amazon.com so you can check them out:

See larger image Garmin iQue 3600 PDA/GPS Handheld System with Americas Detailed Street Mapping (Office Product) List Price: $589.99 USD Used from: $65.00 In Stock

What I like about the Garmin iQue 3600 is that it has a nice compact design and it includes the excellent Garmin software to go with it. It has a really decent price too – I mean c’mon this is a full fledged portable computer capable of playing movies, music, storing your contacts and transporting documents. What I don’t like about it is that it has the Palm OS. Even though I use OS X and Ubuntu Linux the Palm Operating System just doesn’t cut it for me. I’m already on a limited device (for power) and now and locked into a proprietary OS – I just can’t do that.

See larger image HP iPAQ rx5915 Travel Companion (Office Product) List Price: $599.00 USD New From: $229.00 In Stock Used from: $56.99 In Stock

The HP iPAQ rx5915 – Now this baby is sweet and it is my favorite of them all. I’m already partial to PDAs with built in GPSs and I actually paid a lot more for mine than what this is selling for. I’m really impressed by HP’s design on this one, it’s very modern and it really gives you a sense of mobility. They’ve gone all out here and have stepped far away from the typical PDA design. This device is loaded with the Windows Mobile OS and even though I’m not a Windows user on my laptops I really like the Windows Mobile Operating System for a handheld device. This comes with the popular and proven SiRF GPS chipset and is loaded with navigation software and maps.

See larger image Garmin eTrex Venture HC GPS Receiver (Electronics) List Price: Price Not Listed New From: Check Amazon For Pricing In Stock

No matter what there’s a place for this type of simple device. I call the Garmin eTrex Venture HC a ‘Disposable GPS’ and I don’t do that because it’s a bad device. I call it a Disposable GPS because it’s cheap enough and has enough functionality to be worthwhile taking to some of the more rugged places on the face of this earth. When you’re hiking in the Upper Sierra of Chihuahua, Mexico with the guys toting their ‘cuerno de chivo’ (AK47) for your protection this is the type of device that you’ll be wanting to carry. If you lose it, scratch or break it or even if it gets stolen from you it’s pretty rough to take, but it’s not as rough as losing or breaking your PDA. This is also a great first time GPS device – something you can pass off to a friend or family member when you decide to upgrade to something more sophisticated.

By the way – take EXTREME care in the back-country of Mexico. If you happen to stumble on something that doesn’t look right – my suggestion is don’t ever touch it, don’t look at it, and keep moving as if you had never seen it.

Lucky for all of us the Internet is a great place where people share and compile information for the benefit of all of us. The people over at The POI Factory have put together a whole bunch of information and compiled it into downloadable POI files. They’ve done a great job and really have a lot to offer – for FREE!

So if you’ve been tramping around the internet looking for these hard to find files you don’t have to look any further – head over to The POI Factory and grab a few files.

Drive safe and don’t forget to grab the Red-Light and Speed Trap POIs – might even save you some MORE money.

I like to get the most out of the hardware that I buy. For me to do that I need to understand the concepts behind how the device works. Once I’ve studied and I understand the device better I usually find that I get much more enjoyment out of it.

The Dummy series of books is not really for dummy’s. These books are well written and go into some considerable detail about the subject. We’ve all seen these books around and they’re usually more than just a few pages long so you know that the whole book is about more than just the basics.

I’ve found the Dummy series of books to be great reference manuals and they’re written to be used as such too, so even if you don’t want to read the book from front to back it’s still a great reference tool.

The Dummy series of books includes one that was written specifically for GPS and can be purchased on Amazon for a really reasonable price.

For those of you who think that you’re a more advanced user I would suggest a book written by Stephen W. Hinch called “Outdoor Navigation With GPS”. This great and informative book is also available on Amazon for a decent price and can be delivered right to your door without you having to step foot into a bookstore. Even when you have a GPS device it can be hard to navigate the great outdoors because of accuracy problems, tree cover or just plain hard to trek terrain.

No matter how much you know – either of these books will make a great reference manual and you’ll probably learn something more about them too. Not everything is available on the Internet and sometimes when you’re lost in the bush where there is no Internet it’s nice to sit down and read a book.

There are a couple of settings on most devices that you can adjust which will allow you to collect more accurate data. You can usually set your device precision by telling it to throw away or ignore information that is not within a user-set range of accuracy. The two settings that you would adjust are the VDOP and HDOP tolerance values.

VDOP: Stands for Vertical Dilution Of Precision. The higher the VDOP value the more diluted or inaccurate your data becomes.

HDOP: Stands for Horizontal Dilution Of Precision. As with VDOP the higher your HDOP value the less accurate your positional information.

Different GPS devices allow you to configure their accuracy in different ways. Some GPS devices will allow you to tell it to ignore high (less accurate) DOP values. By telling your GPS device to ignore the high HDOP and VDOP values you’ll collect more accurate positional data. After adjusting these setting you may notice that your time to first fix (TTFF) takes a bit longer than when you allowed your device to collect data with the higher VDOP and HDOP values – this is normal and it is the price of accuracy. You may also notice some holes in your data collection. If you’ve set your device to collect a point for every second and it can’t get a value that is within your acceptable precision parameters it will just not store a point for that period of time.

You may find that in areas where satellite communication is difficult (mountainous terrain, dense forrest) that you never achieve a positional fix or that you have to wait for one or two minutes before you can achieve one – again this is a normal side effect of asking your device for more precision and you should adjust your device accordingly.

Assess your own situation and the accuracy of data that you would like to collect and adjust your settings accordingly.