After a couple days, off and on, trying to get achow101's tool to work, I gave up. It was probably my fault, but couldn't get it to work on my windows 10 machine, nor windows 7. I did however, after reading through that thread repeatedly, see someone use the electron wallet itself as the tool. Also probably my fault, but had difficulties trying to verify the pgp signature. (why is there not a simple tool validate like you would use to verify checksum?) I gave up on that as well simply because I had no desire to use the wallet, just wanted to see if it gave out the payment address.
After installing electrum, I went to gyft and added a $15 card then went through the payment process. Clicked the payinvoice and electrum opened up and fields filled as expected. I then right clicked the transaction (in wallet) and selected details where it listed amount and address. Wouldn't let me select the field or copy, so i left the detailed window open and went back to invoice. On the invoice i selected the copy button to reveal the uri link then used the url method. completing this url (
https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=) by adding the merchants id from uri at the end (
https://bitpay.com/invoice-noscript?id=merchantsid) which i copied and pasted into a new browser and that page showed same amount and payment address as the electrum showed on details page.
I believe I am confident that the url method will work, and when I am ready to make a transaction I'll go through the described process at least on first transaction. Then send the address and payment amount via email or usb to my armory computer to complete the transaction finally being able to try out segwit.
I will note on a $15 dollar gift card, bitpay wanted $10 on top of that for there handling and that is not including network fees that would result in approx. $30 total transaction...thats why i didn't test it fully at this time, i'll wait for bitcoin to go back on the uptrend and purchase something a bit more practical. At that point i'll update with results.