Thanks for putting my concern in proper prospective.

However, yesterday was another rainy day and I played around a little more.

The GPS I was using for my intial observation, was a Apelco GPS-15 handheld
but mounted in it's mount adaptor for connection to the power and NMEA cable
to the laptop serial port.

As I stated earlier, The Cap'n drops the third decimal digit. When I switch
to my dedicated GPS module connected via the USB port, The Cap'n displays
the position to the full third decimal place.

I also tried these two different units with the program Net Stumbler.. Net
Stumbler displays the position in degrees (no minutes) and 6 decimal places
(of a degree) of accuracy.

The surprising (and confusing) thing is, this program displayed the full 3
decimal places (of a minute) from the Apelco GPS-15..

So I now know the Apelco is sending the the data but for some reason The
Cap'n is ingnoring the third digit via the serial port while reading it from
the USB port.

(not a very scientific conclusion but the bests I can do. FWIW)

Steve
s/v Good Intentions