Suunto

Suunto Oy, based in Finland, is a company that produces and markets magnetic sports compasses and other navigational products, along with various mechanical and electronic measurement devices.

History

Suunto is best known for its traditional magnetic compasses. In 1936, the company's founder, Tuomas Vohlonen, invented the first successful portable liquid-filled compass designed for individual use. The company grew rapidly after World War II, supplying compasses and other navigational instruments to both civilian and military markets. The Suunto M-5 compass is widely issued to various NATO military forces.

Suunto Oy acquired Recta AG, a Swiss compass manufacturer, in 1996. Suunto Oy was in turn acquired by Amer Sports Group in 1999, which now owns Recta AG. In addition to its own line of magnetic compasses and other measuring instruments, Suunto markets the Recta line of Swiss-made compasses under both the Recta and Suunto brand names.

Current products

Suunto is today also famed for its multi-function electronic wristwatches, which can do everything from providing the news, to providing compass bearings, acceleration, altitude, training effect and even GPS location, depending on the model. These multi-function electronic wristwatches are made for different sports like sailing, golfing, hiking, mountaineering, alpine skiing, training and diving.

In addition to a wide range of magnetic hand-held compasses for general outdoors use and orienteering, Suunto is also known for its KB line of high-quality hand-bearing compasses and inclinometers that are accurate to fractions of a degree, and which are popular among cave explorers, land surveyors, and mariners. Made of machined aluminum, each compass contains a magnetized dial with calibration markings printed along its outer edge. A magnifying lens (KB-14) or prismatic sight (KB-77) is mounted at one end of the instrument with a crosshair providing a view of the disc. In operation, the user divides his or her field of vision with the instrument, using the device's lens or prism to precisely measure the bearing of the object in view.

For many people Suunto is mainly known for producing dive computers where Suunto is the market leader.

Suunto provides high-end training technology to help athletes quantify their training. For cycling, running and heart rate (HRM), Suunto uses the ANT (network) to wirelessly transmit data directly to a PC in real time. Suunto also provides software to interpret those results. Unfortunately, despite a strong business case to the contrary, Suunto has not made any plans to offer a Mac version of their software, even though 64% of premium laptops and 70% of premium desktops being sold are made by Apple according to NPD. [AppleWatch - Macs Defy Window's Gravity [http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/channel/macs_defy_windows-gravity.html] ]

Trivia

* Suunto wristwatches are worn by the members of SG teams in later series of the science fiction show Stargate SG-1 and in the spin-off series Stargate Atlantis. SG teams in Stargate SG-1 wear the black Suunto Vector, while Atlantis teams wear a range of Suunto watches including the Vector and the X-Lander. Richard Dean Anderson specifically requested the props department to source the Suunto Vector for the show.
* A yellow Suunto wristwatch is the basis for the "Hypertime" device in the Nickelodeon movie "Clockstoppers".
* A black Suunto Vector is worn by Bob Lee Swagger in the film Shooter.
* Sawyer (Josh Holloway) wears a Suunto Advizor on episode 4 (Every Man for himself) of Season 3 of the TV series Lost.

External links

* [http://www.suunto.com Suunto] – Official site
* [http://www.iomule.com/Suunto_PC_Pod/Suunto_PC_Pod.html Programming / Decoding the Suunto PC Pod]