Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a free application that converts from. SPC to lat/lon, and downloads/uploads batches of points into a Garmin unit.
It is pretty slick.
I agree with using the Qstarz 818. I had one a few years ago with a DC50 and most recently (up to about 6 months ago when someone lost it) I had another, velcroed to an Allegro (lost that too) running Field Genius. If I needed to convert a bunch of lat/longs to county grid, I'd just run them through a small conversion program and load the ascii file to the Allegro and start a new FG project. Accuracy was very good for a $30 unit (found the last one on Ebay) and battery life was like 30 hours. If you can get a small Bluetooth GPS receiver to work with your existing data collector, you don't have to mess with a separate handheld GPS and the conversions back/forth from SPC - lat/long or whatever don't exist. I have a Garmin Dakota 10 and never used it while I owned the Qstarz. Now I have a CHC LT30 for a data collector (with FieldGenius) and use its internal GPS for navigating and rough location work. Great little data collector for $900.
Dave I used the DC50 for a couple years . I think it was John Evers that put me on the Quarts GPS. Also DC50 was a great data collector to bad they stopped development .
