Garmin GPSmap 60CSx -update

I've now had the opportunity to leave the GPS logging on a long car journey. Very impressive...

Despite being on the floor of the car, the logging was highly accurate (as shown by copying off the .GPX file and loading it into Google Earth). It even shows which side of the road I was driving on.

I've also installed an 8 GB microSDHC card, despite claims on Garmin's website that high capacity cards don't work. This allows the entire Garmin TOPO Great Britain v2 DVD mapping to be loaded onto the device at once (1.7 GB) whilst still leaving an enormous amount of free space for track logs or foreign maps.

For reference, the microSDHC card I used was the Kingston Class 4 microSDHC 8GB card, part number SDC4/8GB. I also tested the equivalent 4GB card, Kingston SDC4/4GB. 4 GB is perfectly adequate for the UK mapping, but the cards are so cheap that you might as well go for 8 GB just in case.

A nice feature of the GPS 60csx is that you can tell it to save a continuous tracklog to the microSD card. You can tell it how often to record a track point (by time, by distance moved, or Auto). This creates a GPX file named with today's date (example: "2009_08_15.GPX") which can be copied to a Mac or a PC via the USB cable. Google Earth can read this file format directly, or you can squirt it into GPSVisualizer.com if you prefer to see it in Google Maps. Quick and easy.