Happy Trails wrote:

With a view to the U.S. Coast Guard Plans for
Universal AIS

http://www.icanmarine.com/downloads/ais-article.pdf

and imminent approval of the AIS standard and adoption of carriage
requirements by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), I
wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see any company with the
experience and success of Garmin diversifying and intoducing more
integration into the commercial marine electronics marketplace.

Having said that, I'd expect they'd do an initial flop or 2 on the
radio side of things, just like Trimble and others have done in other
related market segments, because radio data comms transmission &
control is a whole lot more complicated than most wired system
programmers can understand.

Of course Garmin has already had several marine VHF products such as the
VHF720 &725 as well as the GPSCOM 170 that combined VHF with a GPS receiver.