New GPS+WAAS Products for Consumer Recreational and Marine Markets

SiRF Technology, Inc. and Lowrance Electronics, Inc. today announced an alliance in which Lowrance, the leader in consumer sport fishing SONAR and GPS-mapping products, will employ SiRF’s SiRFStar IIe GPS chip sets to location-enable three new GPS+WAAS mapping products. Taking advantage of SiRFstarII architecture’s built-in support for Federal Aviation Administration’s Wide Area Augmentation System, these products enable anglers, boaters, recreational users and travelers to have precise location and navigation data while fishing, boating, hiking, hunting or exploring new horizons.

These new Lowrance products will be on display this week at the Miami Boat Show. The new products include: iFINDER: A family of four precise, pocket-sized, handheld mapping GPS+WAAS navigation products to help anglers, hikers, hunters, business travelers, leisure travelers, and marine voyagers determine exactly where they are, and how to get to where they want to go. iFINDER features mapping, GPS+WAAS navigation with Multi-Media card or Secure Digital recording with instantly expandable memory to 128MB.

A sporty new combination SONAR and GPS+WAAS product, the LMS-240 enables anglers to find fish and their way in great detail. It’s the only compact-sized fish finder that features digital recording/playback of SONAR graphs and downloading of custom mapping to rewritable MMC and SD digital memory cards. GlobalMap 2400: This is a stand-alone, mapping GPS+WAAS that greatly improves consumers’ sense of direction, featuring a high-resolution LCD display, exclusive MapCreate CD-ROM detailed mapping option, and digital recording/playback of GPS trip details on reusable MMC or SD cards.

We chose SiRF because of their combination of performance in their current products and their roadmap for future products, according to Darrell Lowrance, President and CEO of Lowrance Electronics, Inc. The consumer marine electronics market requires products that are easy to use and reliable. The SiRFstar IIe provides industry-leading performance in customer-critical areas such as time-to-first-fix for fast position fixes and high accuracy with its built-in support for WAAS.

Beyond that, SiRF is committed to continued development of their technology for high volume consumer applications. Their products and technical breadth make them an excellent long term partner for enhanced location-finding technologies across all of our product lines. Lowrance is the ‘gold standard’ for fishing and outdoors sports enthusiasts, with a long history of innovation, according to Kanwar Chadha, Founder and Vice President of Marketing of SiRF.

They were among the first to embrace GPS for sport fishing and have maintained an aggressive new product development effort. We look forward to a productive alliance with Lowrance to bring the benefits of GPS and WAAS enabled location technology to mainstream consumers. SiRFstarIIe Powers Location Capabilities Lowrance uses the SiRFstar II GPS architecture for full 12-channel GPS functionality and built-in WAAS support in a very small footprint.

With its unique set of features such as SnapStart for quick start-up, SnapLock for fast acquisition and FoliageLock for high sensitivity, the SiRFstar architecture based products provide faster, more accurate GPS-based location information in urban canyons and dense foliage - where traditional GPS architectures have significant problems. SiRF’s advanced power management features, such as TricklePower enable longer battery life; a critical requirement for portable devices.

IC includes a powerful embedded ARM7TDMI microprocessor, which can be used to run other non-GPS tasks, thereby eliminating the need for external components and reducing system cost and size. For more information, on the latest GPS News see lowrance gps.

Author Notes:

Garry Shaima contributes and publishes news editorial to http://www.handheld-gps-reviews.com.  A wealth of information about Global Positioning Systems for commercial or personal use.