> Garmin seems to be looking for partners. Scott has been at the leading
> edge of using Garmins with APRS. Here is Garmin's web page for partners,
> it has a link to sign up:
Last time I looked into that, I didn't meet the minimum requirements. I
don't remember all of them, but I think the killer was something like 5
or 10 full-time employees.
> The "helpful" (but smart ass) remarks about just going out and
> purchasing everything that Garmin makes is not how amateur radio goes
> about things. What does one look for in FMI? What parameters can be used
> to window out units that would not meet APRS needs?
Even interrogating the device for its supported protocol list (Garmin
stopped making an attempt to publish that information years ago) only
tells you if it supports the waypoint protocol. Nothing in any
documentation anywhere will tell you what the actual behavior of the
device is.
With the nuvi 350, for example, the product manager in charge of that
whole product line insisted there WAS no waypoint display capability of
any kind, until I sent screen shots demonstrating otherwise. It's
entirely possible none of the programmers even realized it - much of the
code base was undoubtedly reused from older devices, and the waypoint
creation was most likely a bit of vestigial code no one knew had been
included.
Back when I first added Garmin protocol support to the T2, I determined
the capabilities of each device by having people send me in examples,
and then spending an hour or so with each, documenting the symbol lists,
comment lengths, error handling, supported character sets, and so forth.
So I'm not being a smartass (for once) when I say that the way to find
out is to plug it in and try it. The features and behaviors we need
aren't documented by Garmin, and even if you get through to the right
person there, chances are they can't figure it out any easier than we
can. This is likely to remain the case until Garmin codifies all of the
important stuff in something like the FMI spec. This has started to
happen with FMI 2.5, but it's not quite there yet.
Scott
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