[R-sig-Geo] reading a gps from R

[Patrick Giraudoux]

Dear Listers,

I am trying to write R fonctions to read data from a gps through gpsbabel.

Within linux I have tried this (read garmin gps and write a tab 
delimited text file wp.txt) and it works well:

system("gpsbabel -w -i garmin -o openoffice /dev/ttyUSB0 
/home/giraudoux/wp.txt")

I have two questions:

1/ I wonder whether it would be technically possible to open the 
connexion directly to a R object (eg data.frame) rather than to write a 
text file (here wp.txt) ?

2/ I wonder how to open a USB device/port within a windows XP 
environment (linux equivalent of /dev/ttyUSB0).

Thanks in advance for any hint...

Patrick