> RE: Laptops in the daylight
> Even if I had a good stand for the laptop it
> would still be off to one side and require looking way away from the road
to
> see any good info.
Well once you have routed to your location most of the s/w i have seen
displays
a large font (20pt) with the next driving directions & will auto change
background colors
depending on time of day maybe the IBMTinkPad just has very good LCD but as
long as the
laptop was below dash level I never had an issue readin the next direction
prompt
>The voice prompts can be hard to hear above the road and vehicle noise.
that why you have the headphone jack on the laptop :) or what i did
was to take another male-male jack & plug the lap top right into the van
sound system
(this make for great dvd viewing as well :)
on the garmin nroute the nice lady comes at 500M to the turn & starts
counting down every 100M
and when I mess up she says uturn, then she gives up on the uturn
& routes me on the next best pattern to get me back on track

...
>but not much because of the  constant signal drop out.

I wonder if the GPS receiver your using is a major issue
with the rino 530 the only time I recall the gps receiver did not getting
satellite
was under a tunnel/bridge, or when hiking under realy thick tree canopy, but
when
mounted with a RAM mount http://www.ram-mount.com
up on the dash I'd have to say recepetion on that X-Canada trip was
excellent
even in the remote farming rural areas of SK, AB & PQ ...

does you GPS support  WASS

And living in BC I am slowly keying all the BC Forestry Services Sites as
waypoints
from the GPS coordinates on the BCFS site
http://aardvark.gov.bc.ca/apps/recst/
it a bit painfull because you have to drill down on each site then select
the  'I' tool
and they it give the GPS location
       Coordinate Position
      UTM 10N:  300830, 5549923
      BC Albers:  1015518, 561392
      Geographic:  50� 4' 5" N, 125� 47' 0" W

       Recreation Sites

      Recreation Site Details
      Rec Site #:  REC6052
      SiteName:  Third Lake

When it is all done I can share it with others but I am still not sure what
the most generic way to share
GPS waypoints is anybody else have any greater experince in this area ???