I contacted Cris about a similar problem after upgrading my PC to Win 8.1.
He indicated that some of the older serial-to-USB cables would not work with Win 8.1. Suggest you contact him for details.
Erik
Some of the issue is with the clone USB to serial chips. The drivers have been altered to nix counterfeit chips. Won't work unless you're able to roll back the driver. Same issue occurred with the Sainsonic AP510 GPS tracker. They had to ship a cable with a "good" USB to serial chip in the plug to get the thing to connect. FTDI got sick of their designs being copied.
MapSphere can get you a nice screenshot of a flight to the point of last packet reception, though it's no longer supported by the developers. That was confirmed to me by private email over two years ago. It's dead software.
Digging into it out in the field to get the last received lat/long value so one can input it into a handheld GPS to navigate to the last known packet/likely recovery site is tedious. Some of the map links are dead I think. At least they were a couple of years ago
the last time I tried it.
GPS rocket locator is sometimes squirrelly and it's best to have the LCD receiver for backup so one can input data manually into a mapping GPS to navigate to the rocket. Plus if one has a portable receiving station, it's easier to reacquire a new packet if the
last received position is not the final resting place. I will tell you, having an easy method to navigate to the rocket like GPS rocket locator is a cakewalk. Just follow from point A to point B on the screen.
I strongly suggest if you have rockets that routinely go "sight unseen" you have a portable receiving station that's easy to carry.
I was really getting fired up about using a laptop to store flights but I find it takes time to set the station up that would better be used for launching. Plus if you run into a setup bug in the field, you're in trouble.
If you are going to go the laptop route, practice relentlessly with your tracking software, how you are going to record, save the data or what have you. Know it cold before you get to the field. Or, simply use a portable receiving station
and fly more rockets. If you simply want to save a map with the rocket flight on it, you could use any APRS tracking program and plug/pair the EggFinder receiver in through the GPS port of your receiving program. ie. UI-View,
YAAC, Xastir or something else. Problem here is the learning curve of these programs would be very high for a neophyte. Kurt