One of the things that was not clear from you posts is exactly what it is you want on your GPS.  If you want the campsite/portage data, that is one thing and can easily be done with free software.  If you want to copy actual maps, that gets complicated.  The cost is not for the software, it is for the electronic maps. garmin wants to make a profit so they have made it difficult to load anything but their maps onto their GPSes.  Now there is some software out there that people have written that allows free maps (topos) to be loaded into Gramin GPSes.  I am not sure of the state of that software but when I last looked, it was way to much work and too unreliable for me to mess with.