Hi Burnie, Shooter:
I don't know what the upper limit on the number of map segments for the SP 26xx series is, however, my guess is that it must be pretty high, because the 2620 model comes preloaded with all the map segments for North America, or all the map segments for Europe, depending on which model you buy.
Concerning the manner in which the CF card is formatted, I remember looking once, but I have since forgotton, and I don't have my data chip handy right now to check. But, there is an easy way to check:
1) Put the data chip in a CF card holder that is designed to fit into a PCMCIA slot (slot in the side of a laptop). The computer operating system will mount the CF card as if it is a drive. Now select the drive, right-click on it, and select 'properties' - this should supply you with a property sheet about the CF card drive that includes information about the file allocation table structure. I kind of think it is FAT 12, but I'm not sure.
We can easily check to see if the GPSR will accept a chip that has a FAT 32 file structure by just re-formatting the data chip as a FAT 32 drive. To do this, first copy the map package off the chip (it will be a single file in a folder entitled "Garmin" - so just copy the whole folder with enclosed file to your desktop) - then reformat the drive as FAT 32 using the Windows OS (I use Windows XP Pro, so going to Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management is how I would do it) and then put the Garmin folder with enclosed map file back on it. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, then you can just re-format the CF card as FAT 12 (or whatever it was in the first place) and again replace the map folder and file.
I think, though, that it would probably be safer overall to stick with the 2 gig card as the upper limit for the time being. I know that Garmin has tested the GPSR quite thoroughly with many different brands of CF cards up to 2 gigs in size. As long as the card manufacturer follows the CF card industry association specs when they build the card, it will work in the GPSR. But, hardware manufacturers who are the first to bring bigger, faster devices to market often build to a 'draft' standard of an industry spec, and if the device is not compatable with what else is out there - well, that's the price you pay for being on the "bleeding edge" of technology.
In theory, you could format a 4 or 8 gig CF card to FAT 12 spec, this would limit the data storage size on it to 2 megs, but it would ensure that the file structure is the same as a smaller CF card (if, in fact, FAT 12 is the structure used on the CF cards that ship with the GPSR's). You could then reformat the card to FAT 32, or even NTFS, for use with devices other than your GPSR.
But, realistically, 2 Gigs of map storage should be enough for not only the current version of CN, but the next version as well. Version 8 will be at least 2 years down the road, by that time, memory prices will have dropped by half, at least - so there's nothing to gain by purchasing the huge CF card right now. I suspect it would be cheaper overall to get two 2 gig cards if you want to hold both continents. Or, do what I do - just store the required segments from both continents on the same CF card. I commute between Canada and Europe monthly, a 1 gig card holds everything I need from both places. It's unlikely I will visit Finland, Corsica, Maine and San Diego on the same trip...
PanEuropean
PS: About map segment limits - the really early generation of GPSR's (pre-2000 stuff) had a limit to the number of map segments that could be read from a data chip, regardless of the size of the data chips. So, when the 128 meg data chips came out in 2001, owners of units that shipped in 1998 with 8 meg chips found out that they could store tons of maps on a 128 meg chip, but the 1998 GPSR could only read the first 50 map segments on the chip. This is now only a historical footnote, no longer a concern with any current shipping Garmin product.
