My concern was only with wiring and voltages and such. There was some discussion in another thread about whether or not it was really RS-232 because it was meant to interface with a Palm, not a PC.

I used to attach Palms directly to Unix machines serial prt to work as a portable console. I don't believe that the cable had any electronics in it, so I think that the Palm's serial port works at the same voltages as a standard serial port, and, by the transitive property, your GPS receiver should be the same.

But I could be wrong.

The parser that converts the raw route descriptions is a Python script and a bit picky.

Ouch. Any solutions for us Windows users?

How about using Python? There have been Windows ports forever. And those ActiveState guys have an ActivePython, too.