Thread: All-in-one mountaineering GPS+Weather+Tracking+GIS portable station

Hello,

I recently acquired a Garmin GPSmap 62st and I've been working on setting up a portable system for GIS, weather/pressure/altitude, mapping, satellite imagery and tracking. I would like to include radio in the bunch, alas I have no gadgets except for a serial/RS232 scanner and that's far from portable.

My intention is to have a lightweight all-in-one system which I can use while wandering the woods, with decent battery life, and compatible with custom or commercial solar panel chargers. At the moment I'm using a Toshiba netbook, but there are other options with much higher battery life. It's more gear than I like to carry on but it can be quite useful.

So far I've integrated:
- NASA World Wind with JSatTrak.
- Google Earth with Basecamp
- MapSource (working to get topo maps for Europe, USA, Canada).
- GIS solution (still working on it, for weather mapping/meteorology).

I'm curious about fellow users of GPS devices with a barometer, so these would be the first few questions:

1. Any free or government-sponsored weather mapping/meteorology application which can use real time readings for maps? Bonus points if we can 'connect' it to the GPS output to properly handle location, etc.
2. Any application that can be used to record the altitude and pressure information from the rig through time? Does the device itself store this information, for how long?
3. Is it possible to fit multiple regions in the same SD card so we can carry them all in one place?
4. Does the Garmin GPSmap 62st & co have size limits for the SD card?
5. Any free alternative for satellite imagery, or pre-built maps?
6. Any software that allows us to automatically upload waypoints, etc to a server (bonus points if we can run this ourselves)? This comes handy in certain situations.

I'm sorry if some of these questions are answered elsewhere, but I thought it might be better to make my first post somewhat more interesting than a simple introduction.

If any of you likes astronomy, feel free to suggest software for that as well. I know people who could enjoy something like this for their stargazing escapades.

cheers!