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Garmin To Marry GPS with FRS/GMRS
zornorph writes "Garmin is set to come out with the Garmin RINO in June, which integrates FRS and GMRS radio with a GPS unit, which will give it up to a 5 mile range of communication. Garmin has a unique twist though, to quote their site: "What really separates the Rino from the rest of the FRS herd is the ability to "beam" your exact location to another Rino user within a two-mile range using the FRS spectrum." However, there are concerns about the implementation of this "beaming", as it causes interference with GMRS users."
As for "interference", well, it's not radio interference people are talking about, it's the use of channels for data that were designated for voice services. I mean, why stop at transmitting 100bytes or so? If this use is permitted, why not run a wireless modem over it?
Altogether, both the patent and the abuse of voice spectrum for data services reflect poorly on Garmin.
-adam
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"I rule. -aron"
Those who do not study Amateur radio are doomed to reinvent it.
We've had this "location beaming" capability for some time - it's called
APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System).
We've also had interference problems, a**holes on the bands, and repeaters causing interference. That's why we have licenses and are held accountable by the FCC - so that if somebody starts doing this, they get hit with a $8000 fine.
Just look at Children's Band (CB) - one big heterodyne squeal from end to end. Why did this happen? Because the FCC allowed anybody to use CB without a license, and stopped enforcing the law there. Now Chicken Band is like reading at -1.
If they want to stop this, the FCC needs to enforce the law. Go after anybody causing interference, require radio manufacturers to show their nifty new features don't cause harm, etc.
Otherwise, FRS will be CB at a higher frequency.
(And personally, I'm glad there's a place for these morons to play that isn't where I am trying to communicate.)
(Of course, many BPOFs (brass pounding old farts) will say the same about me, since I am a DSNCT (dirty stinking no-code tech).)
www.eFax.com are spammers
you could just as soon tell the person where you are
First, I wanted to reply "not if you don't know where you are." The first scenario I envisioned was of inexperienced hikers getting separated.
Hiker1: "Help! I fell and I twisted my ankle real bad!"
Hiker2: "Where are you? I can't hear you!"
Hiker1: "I see.. trees! Not just a few trees, but a LOT of trees! Oh, and there's some water way off through the trees!"
Now Hiker1 can xmit their position to their partner. And if their partner doesn't know NSEW, they can at least start to walk in circles and see how their movement affects their position reading.
But second, I wanted to see if anyone remembered a supergeek who built a pair of high tech boats and jackets that communicated position information over APRS. Each boat would show its passenger the distance and direction to the other boat. And while the boaters were on land, they could use an HT to xmit DTMF tones back to the boat. One command instructed the boat the calculate the distance and direction to the other boater (walking or not) and use voice synthesis to reply with the distance and direction details. I think when last I read about him (years ago) he was building the same functionality into bicycles.
My point being that distance and direction would have been a nice feature instead of or in addition to raw lat/long data.
Intelligent Life on Earth
As for cable, if the amatueur radio operator is getting into CATV, that means CATV is leaking and possibly interfering with other radio systems like public safety two-way and aircraft radio systems. The cable company should clean up their system or risk running afoul of the FCC. A properly operated CATV system will not suffer ingress from an amateur radio operator.
Telephone interference is in the same vein; if the ham's signal is getting into the phone network (as opposed to the neighbors' $9.95 phones) the telephone company is responsible for cleaning their plant up. However, chances are that the telephones themselves (even wireline) aren't properly shielded ...
Broadcast interference *may* be the responsibility of the ham to clean up, but again without knowing the specifics, it's hard to tell. Part of the problem may be that the ham is using ungodly amount of power when low power would do. Maybe if the ham turned down the power things would get cleaned up. Who knows? Has anyone tried working with the guy instead of just trying to make him go away?
A lot of folks would rather not work with the ham to understand what interference modes are present. Chances are they complain about interference but really have a problem with the huge monstrosity of an antenna in the back yard. It's not uncommon for neighbors of a ham with one of these huge antennas to be suffering all sorts of interference problems even when the ham is not operating. There are two sides to every story.
-z
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
My wife is almost ready to drop huge amounts of money on a set of these for the family. "Popular Science" had a "What's New" blurb on them this month. That write-up made it sound like the units could be set to spontaneously transmit their positions periodically, and that they could draw a map of the other units' current positions relative to each other and to any other waypoints that have been set.
The appealing part of this is that we go camping once in a while, and have had the kids get "lost" (ie., out of sight) more than once. Nothing's worse than your wife going nuts because the 3yo has wandered off... If the kid's position can be plotted without the kid having to do anything, we're there! (ESPECIALLY if the radios come in a ruggedized version, maybe without the screen for the kids' units.)
While the integrated GPS may have been done before by HAMs, this is the first "for the masses" product that has done this. I still wonder how they're going to get around the data-over-FRS restrictions, though.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.