"Note that using an 8051 to do navigation may not be a good idea if you require a lot of floating point calcs - "

Thanks for your tips. Yes the above wisdom is kind off starting to dawn. As suggested maybe a Windows running on a minimal Pentium SBC ( like those from Advantech ) will be the way to go. It will atleast save me from crunching FP maths with a processor not geared to do it.

The ground work is still continuing and the amount of information to be grabbed before you could use the GPS is quite voluminous.

Raghu