Boyd,
Could you clariffy 'You can put a 16GB micro SD card into the unit and have plenty of storage available' ?
I have seen some posts saying you could use a micro card larger than 4Gb; however, because of FAT limits the Garmin GPSrs could only 'see'/use 4Gb.
Finally got around to trying this myself. I have now downloaded over 7.5GB of BirdsEye imagery so I wanted to see how it worked. Took the 16GB card I was using for something else, backed it up, and copied the BirdsEye files to it.
Works like a charm; I can see all 7.5GB of Imagery. Have not yet hit the trail with this, but BirdsEye seems to work as expected. It zooms and pans faster than the custom maps I made myself and it is visible through the range of 20 feet to 12 miles. At 20 miles, it disappears. At zoom settings between 1.2 and 12 miles, the low resolution preview image is shown. At settings between 20 feet and .8 miles, the full resolution image is shown.
BaseCamp has its own issues. Others have reported a lot of problems with it choking as you download more imagery. This seems to be related to your operating system - the 32 bit systems seem more problematic. I am running Vista 64 and everything worked great for awhile, but after I got abouit 6GB of imagery it began slowing down and is not very stable or responsive with 7.5GB. It is using as much as 3.7GB of RAM and 65% CPU when transferring files to the GPS and slows down my whole system.
Now that everything is safely loaded on the card and backed up to a folder on my computer, I will remove some of the images from BaseCamp to speed it up.