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Technology Stocks : Trimble Navigation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SKIP PAUL who wrote (2647)	7/28/1998 8:04:00 PM
From: Yin Shih	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3506

Re: TN500 I'm a little confused by this announcement, which a product brochure or a hands-on demo might resolve. Basically, the announcement makes a big deal about the Course Deviation Indicator (CDI) mode. But Trimble (and others) have had an electronic CDI in their boxes for quite a while. Further, it is generally considered a "bad" thing to spend a lot of time looking at a GPS's display when flying IFR because normal panel positions for a GPS are not in the "instrument scan" area (the area monitored continuously by pilots). Instead, panel-mount GPS's have had interfaces to drive the analog CDI or HSI indicators that are already there to support VOR or RNAV units which are in the instrument scan area. Since these indicators should behave as before I'm not sure what the hype is about. That being said, there is a general complaint about virtually all panel-mount GPS's in that they are "non-intuitive" to set up and to sequence through legs, particularly on an instrument approach. If Trimble has truly improved the user interface here and made it "intuitive", as they claim, then this could be a plus. Big plus or little plus depends on how good a job they did and whether there is intellectual property protection available for the improved interface design. Mentioned more briefly in the announcement is an "internal moving map". This is a very good thing if it is a decent resolution moving map. Trimble's TN2000 line has been deficient in providing moving map capabilities while Allied Signal, Garmin, and Apollo have been offering it for the last 2-3 years. Trimble's solution was to work a package deal with Argus that provided a separate moving map component. This was bad because there were two boxes that had to be installed. It was good in that Argus was acknowledged as having an absolutely superb moving map. Being able to offer an internal moving map fills a serious gap in their feature list and was long overdue. The list price seems about normal if you consider that Trimble includes a control panel/annunciator which can be another several hundred $. Re: TrimView 500 This box seems to be competitive with the Argus moving map system mentioned above. A plus versus Argus is that it can display charts as image bitmaps in full-color whereas the Argus uses vector line graphics. A minus is that an LCD display is usually not as crisp as a comparably sized, well-aligned vector display. A lot of pilots have started flying with laptops and charts on CD-ROM, sometimes integrating a GPS sensor through the serial port or PCMCIA slot, in the last year or two, so the TrimView 500 addresses that need/desire. But this product is potentially more than just a laptop replacement as integrating chart-like moving maps, GPS info, spherics (lightning detector) display, and radar display is a nice thing for the high-end avionics panel. Panel space is always at a premium and being able to replace 3 display heads with 1 makes it more attractive. It also provides a user benefit in that the pilot doesn't have to mentally overlay the results of the displays in his head, it can be merged right on the display. Size is a factor in the retro-fit market as the chances of finding 4-5" of vertical height in an existing panel is not so good unless the owner is willing to completely redesign the panel. On the other hand it isn't as much of an issue for panels on new planes. Cost is also a factor, but that wasn't mentioned. Re: General Aviation strategy Overall, Trimble seems to be continuing to expand and improve the avionics product line with an eye toward being a major player in the General Aviation marketplace for planes less than about $500K. Some gaps that might stand to be filled in are: Combined GPS/Comm Autopilot Analog HSI Electronic HSI With those items, I think Trimble would be capable of going head to head with Allied Signal by being a one stop panel supplier (worth $10-15K for a basic panel up to $50-70K for all the bells and whistles). Completing this product lineup, if that is their intent, might take another 1-3 years, depending on how much $ they put into it. Whether that is a desirable strategy is uncertain. Cessna has reopened its production lines for its 4-seaters (using Allied Signal), Cirrus is about to complete flight testing on its SR20 (with TrimLine designed in), and Lancair is coming online too. But the really big boom in General Aviation right now seems to be in the 4-12 seat turboprops and jets. One of the reasons for this boom may be the success of Executive Jets (recently bought by Warren Buffett for something like $750M). Executive Jets sells and operates timeshares in corporate jets, expanding the market by making jets affordable for the occasional/marginal owner. (There was a recent announcement of a company trying to start a low-end time share businesss trying to duplicate EJ's success at the high-end). These high-end planes are priced from $1-5M and the big ticket avionics items are Electronic HSI's, Electronic Flight Information Displays, Flight Management Systems, Collision Avoidance Systems, Radar, Spherics, and Ground Proximity Warning Systems. These items can add several hundred thousand dollars or more to a turbo-prop or private jet avionics panel. The TrimView 500 is a possible step in that direction, but still incomplete. In fact a move in that direction could cause problems for Trimble's partnership with Honeywell/Collins in the high end, so it seems unlikely.