I tried that by building a translator program, but I had a devil of a
time of it.

Garmin does some kind of weird compression scheme which strips
adjacent data in ASCII format. Or at least that's what I think is
going on - may not be.


Not sure I follow you. Once your waypoint data is saved in the
tab-delimited ASCII file, it's pretty simple to massage it. The MapSource
export function will export all data in the file, coordinates, waypoint
names, and a bunch of other extraneous stuff, which would not apply to
uploading to another type of unit. Just open the ASCII file in Excel, or
for that matter, any text editor (Excel makes it easier to work with since
it is columnar data), and delete the data that is unnecessary to get it
ready for import. I have no idea if Northstar offers software for waypoint
management and route planning and if so, whether it would allow the
importation of text data. If it does allow for the import, it would just be
a matter of making sure the columnar data is in the order expected by the
Northstar software.