My BGT-31 (new SIRF-III NaviGPS with Bluetooth) arrived yesterday from StorageDepot.

It look exactly like the BGT-11 but is far more able to get, on hold, signal. My tracks look pretty good and without, even when heading down narrow alleys and under dense tree cover.

Setting up was simply a case of inserting the SD card, turning it on and turning on logging (which I actually forgot to do).

Like the 'beta' firmware I have on my BGT-11, it is able to dump tracks from internal memory to SD card.

Thanks to 'pope' TomH the latest release of GPSBabel (1.3.5) includes support for the NaviGPS, both directly and from the dumped files. Simply use 'navilink' as the input format - but don't forget the -t flag to get the tracks off.

Getting the latest GPSBabel into Ubuntu Hardy was easy once I knew what I was doing; use 'alien' to convert the .rpm package to .deb. I also had to make a symbolic link in /usr/lib pointing libexpat.so.0 to libexpat.so.1 - presumably there's a better solution but it seems to work, which building from source didn't.

So my tracks were salvaged. Unfortunately my mapping was cut short when the point of a drawing pin (thumb tack for you Americans) pierced my front inner tube - the third puncture I've had to repair on that, second within a month.