The business consultants said there was no market for the product, yet today FTS sells environmental monitoring solutions worldwide, counts millions in sales, employs over 75 people and is celebrating 40 years of reliability and innovation!

You have to wonder how the business consultants got it so wrong in 1980. Perhaps they didn’t grasp the importance of remote environmental data monitoring. Maybe they didn’t understand the power of emerging technology. They almost certainly didn’t anticipate the never-say-die attitude of the company’s founder, Bill Cave, and those who have followed him.

It was the late 1970s when Cave first imagined automating the collection of weather data by marrying radio telemetry to remote electronic monitoring stations. As a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service, he knew the systems were needed. Certain in his vision, he began developing his first prototypes in the basement of his home in Victoria, Canada and by 1980 he was taking out a $30,000 mortgage on his home to incorporate FTS.

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