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 service, while pricey, is fast.

Recently Garmin introduced two recreational products named "Rino 110" and "Rino 120".  These are small FRS/GMRS radios with integrated GPS that has APRS like capabilities.  Users of the Rino 110, or 120 can beam their position to other Rino 110 users and their position will display itself on the receiving radios 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.

Rino 110 information page:
http://www.garmin.com/products/rino/

Suggested price: $194.27

A Rino 110 Map screen:
http://www.garmin.com/products/rino/screen.html

Rino 120 information page on:
http://www.garmin.com/products/rino120/

Suggested price: $267.84

Various Rino 120 Map screens:
http://www.garmin.com/products/rino120/screen.html

Position Reporting Features shown here:
http://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 radios make running APRS simple.  Not only that, these Radio/TNC devices performs 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.