Turns out I need to fix up a home-made Garmin eTrex data cable since the Garmin eTrex that arrived today as an early birthday present doesn’t come with any way to connect it to a computer.
Having only a GPS receiver makes not much sense. One should be able to prepare waypoints and routes at one’s own computer to transfer those to the Garmin eTrex. For this you need a data cable which costs up to 50$. That’s quite much for a simple serial cable without any electronics. Due to that I made my own cable.
And make it, he does, as do some other brave souls. I kid: it’s three wires, but still some folks are going to be bilked out of some change for this.
I have had the little device on today while out and about and it’s quite interesting and informative. Turns out I live 238 feet above sea level, or thereabouts. Once I get this cable made, I plan to log a week or so of driving and errand-running to look for optimizations and savings. US$40+ fillups are getting old.