Sony for the longest time was pushing its own proprietary data interface and memory card very hard. The NX80V has a CompactFlash slot only grudgingly, and only because customers loudly demanded it. The downside to this is that the CF card can only be used by default for storage, and even that only in a limited fashion.

A number of enterprising people have come up with various ways around this, the most well known probably being the Athena CF Enabler driver. This allows the CF slot to be used for storage even with the default Clie applications that normally want to use only the MemoryStick slot. Unfortunately, it handles only storage.

While doing research on GPS and PDA mapping software, I came across MapAdvisor, and in their FAQ, it is noted that the NX80V is supported via a special driver. Encouraged, I went ahead and ordered a Fortuna Dual-Mode XTrack CF GPS. It arrived, I tried it out, and...

Absolutely no response whatsoever. I can't even get it to initialize, much less get a lock.

Spending a lot more time hunting around for further information, I find out that this driver is somewhat unfinished hobbyist work, no longer maintained, and seems to have about a 50% success rate. I appear to have gotten unlucky.

This is very frustrating, as I'd wanted to take up geocacheing as a hobby to get me out of the house more often. I'm considering starting over again, putting all the maps on a CF card, then buying a MemoryStick Bluetooth transceiver along with the Fortuna Bluetooth GPS. This is expensive, however, and I've already spent a small fortune on a camera that has not even arrived yet. I guess I'm going to put this off for a while.

In the mean time, I've passed the CF GPS off to Jeff, to see if he can come up with a use for it.