"We are continually looking for ways to add value to our line of GPS handhelds," said Gary Kelley, Garmin's director of marketing. "Location reporting and location polling add unique safety and security applications to our Rino series that come in handy when trying to locate a family member at an amusement park or when seeking to recover an injured hiking partner in the great outdoors."
The Garmin Rino radios integrate GPS technology
with FRS/GMRS two-way voice communications to create an innovative way
for families, hikers, campers and other groups of outdoor enthusiasts to
stay connected. Garmin combined these technologies to deliver an
enhanced safety feature called location reporting. The company holds two
patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 6,373,430 and 6,492,941) on this unique
feature. In essence, location reporting allows Rino users to transmit
their position over FRS channels to other Rino users in the area and
also see where their companions are located on the unit’s display. The
company has already learned of several incidents in which this feature
has saved lives.
Location polling is another unique feature of
the Rino series. This feature allows Rino owners to pinpoint the
location of other Rino users within the FRS range (up to two miles) and
even navigate to the location of a specific radio user. For the polling
feature to function correctly, users need to have all Rino radios
enabled to send and receive location information requests, they need to
be monitoring the same FRS channel, and they need a GPS position fix on
all radios in the group. Once enabled, Rino radios will automatically
respond to a location information request from another radio. Due to FCC
regulations, a polling request can be initiated only once every 30
seconds; however, Rino radios can receive multiple queries from other
radios and respond immediately. Users can also disable this feature.
With location reporting, users can stay in contact through voice and
location transmissions. The new location-polling feature allows a set of
Rino users to seek and find a member of the party that is unable to
communicate with the group or cannot report his or her location, for
whatever reason.
The location-polling feature is currently
available and can be downloaded at no cost as a software update for the
Rino 110 and Rino 120 from the Garmin website (www.garmin.com).
