Garmin, a juggernaut?
Garmin is making waves beyond its smart seeming autopilot acquisition today. For one thing, a bit of evidence in the incident involving the 15 British Royal Navy detained by Iran is the clever helicopter photo above, in which a wee little Garmin eTrex is being used to prove the ship was in international waters. Garmin was also selected as a new member of Wired magazine’s 40 most innovative companies, at 22 just above Amazon’s current rating, yet. But maybe the most interesting tell is a call I got today from a hedge fund researcher working on the investment premise that Garmin is such a juggernaut that publicly traded competitors like TomTom and Raymarine may be good shorts. I don’t know much, but I don’t think I’d bet on that.
Garmin makes some great products, unfortunately many of their GPS receivers do not transmit NMEA data. Instead they only support the proprietary Garmin data transfer mode making them incompatible with many nav software titles. Not sure why Garmin has chosen not to send NMEA data over their USB cable when many others do.