The performance of the Garmin 696 in getting an initial satellite lock has been degrading for a bit but I was pushing the issue out of my mind since it would eventually work fine but the initial lock was taking far too long. I did a bit of basic trouble shooting, called Garmin tech support. They indicated that a 5 minute lock up was all that they could count on but that was inconsistent with other published data and the original performance of the unit which always got a lock within 30 seconds or so. I tried another online tech the next day and got a suggestion to do a hard reset of the unit... finally from VAF a Garmin tech with much more experience suggested testing the unit using the internal antenna to see if the external antenna or connector had failed.
With the unit out of the plane the internal antenna worked as expected and the external was mostly worthless... unfortunately I could not determine if the fault was with the connector, the internal interface, or the antenna. I tried to grab another antenna to test but could not find one so I ended up ordering a replacement to be delivered within a week.
It took about 5 minutes with the plane sitting outside in the sun an it still sat there on Autolocate.
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| crappy performance form the external Garmin antenna |
