A couple people were interested, so I thought I would describe the connection between laptop and gps via a homemade cable. A photo of the back of both units is shown below. The Magellan GPS has four copper pads for connection via their expensive cable. The essential connection is between the two pads shown and the illustrated pins on the serial port of the laptop (or any computer). Circled yellow on the right is a 9 pin connector from Radio Shack (2 bucks) which will plug into the serial port. Wire it to make the connections (shown with the colored lines) and the GPS will continuously spit out coordinate data to the computer. Plot programs such a SEACLEAR (freeware from www.sping.com) will look for this data on the serial port and will plot it on a map.

so it looks to me that you just solder'd the two spots onto the the back of the gps and then ran those wires into the 9 pin connector and there she is ready to roll, as long as you have the software set up and ready to go. ingenius, i checked on that cable from the gps manufacturer and they want $39 bucks for just the cable, now i dont mind a little mark up but holy $%&* what is that cable made out of????? how long has this little bit of splicing been working for you? Fishy.............

to fishy: yes, Magellan makes those funky pads just so they can make a special cable to sell to you.

Yes, my cable is soldered to the pads. It has been on there for a year or so. The most important thing is to provide strain relief for the cable. In my case I epoxied the cable to the side of the unit. It is important that you do something, otherwise the cable will soon break.

A word to those not that handy with a soldering iron... you might just shop around a little bit for those proprietary interface cables before you go through the trouble to make one... a friend of mine ended up buying the special one made for his Garmin eTrex for $15 on eBay.

-N.