FRS/GMRS  APRS
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GMRS/FRS APRS Hand-held Radios - An Interesting Trend
by Roger Rines W1RDR

Garmin has long been a leader in innovative GPS products.  Its list of products covers many areas such as marine, aircraft, recreation and mobile uses.  My two Garmin GPS devices are very capable and perform very well, and their customer service while pricey, is fast. 

Recently Garmin introduced two recreational products named the "Rino 110" and "Rino 120".  These are small FRS/GMRS radios with an integrated GPS.  Both radios have APRS position reporting capabilities that similar to Amateur Radio's APRS protocol. 

Users of the Rino 110, or 120 can beam their position to other Rino users and their radio position will display itself on the receiving radio's map display.  Rino 120 users have a built in base map of roads and 8MB of memory to load maps from various Garmin map collections.

Here is the information page on Rino 110:https://www.garmin.com/products/rino/

Suggested price: $194.27

Various Map screen for the Rino 110:
https://www.garmin.com/products/rino/screen.html

Here is the information page on Rino 120:
https://www.garmin.com/products/rino120/

Suggested price: $267.84

Various Map screens for the Rino 120:
https://www.garmin.com/products/rino120/screen.html

Position Reporting Feature is shown here: https://www.garmin.com/products/rino/positionReport.html

What is interesting about this GPS/Radio device is the trend of how the technology is being married together.  APRS users have long ago found how useful its position reporting can be in events and while traveling, but until now the closest amateur gear we've seen to allowing appliance style APRS has been from Kenwood with their TM-D700A and TH-D7A(g) radios.  Both Kenwood radios make running APRS simple.  Not only that, these Kenwood Radio/TNC devices perform very well in a wide range of conditions where the more complicated TNC devices can't function well.

If Garmin's product introduction is indicative of what is coming in the future, then I suspect we'll see amateur gear with similar capabilities before too long.

What does Rino mean?
Garmin created the name as an acronym for Radio Integrated Navigation Outdoors.

Our ability to get coordinated and locate is growing.

 

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Last modified:
Sunday February 17, 2008.