66i in case of battery failure

Hi all,

I'm considering purchasing a 66i, one of the things that's holding me back is that I had a Montana 600 in the past with a Garmin battery pack. The battery died after a couple of years, that wasn't a big issue because the battery was replaceable, I also had the option of using regular AA batteries. Note that if I had the battery inside the unit, and I plugged it in to an external battery source, this would not allow me to turn on the GPS unit and use it for navigation, it would only show up as plugged in to USB and charging, but could not turn it on.

This is my concern with the 66i, what happens in case of a faulty battery on the field? can I still plug it in to a power pack and use it to return to civilization or am I stuck with an expensive brick?

Thanks.

0 atlas_cached over 4 years ago

PHomero said:
This is my concern with the 66i, what happens in case of a faulty battery on the field? can I still plug it in to a power pack and use it to return to civilization or am I stuck with an expensive brick?

I have not heard of any cases where this scenario played out. Garmin uses a high quality battery in these devices, same as found in the inReach Explorer+ and SE, and those units are still going strong.

I imagine it would depend on the 'potential' battery failure type, but since I have not heard of any, I have zero data with which it form a reasonable hypothesis.

PHomero said:
I had a Montana 600 in the past

PHomero said:
if I had the battery inside the unit, and I plugged it in to an external battery source, this would not allow me to turn on the GPS unit and use it for navigation, it would only show up as plugged in to USB and charging, but could not turn it on.

Not sure why that is as the Montana 6x0 will operate normally off of external power when properly configured. I have done so more times than I can count. The 'USB Mass Storage Mode' should only be available when connected to a 'data' capable device (like your PC or laptop).

0 PHomero over 4 years ago in reply to atlas_cached

Thanks for the support atlas

atlas_cached said:
have not heard of any cases where this scenario played out. Garmin uses a high quality battery in these devices, same as found in the inReach Explorer+ and SE, and those units are still going strong.

It's good to hear that enclosed Inreach battery's have high reliability and low failure ratio.

atlas_cached said:
Not sure why that is as the Montana 6x0 will operate normally off of external power when properly configured. I have done so more times than I can count. The 'USB Mass Storage Mode' should only be available when connected to a 'data' capable device (like your PC or laptop)

I got my Montana600 out last night, and tried again with the same faulty battery, plugged it in to different wall chargers and a powerbank and goes straight onto "USB mass storage mode". Don't want to turn this into a Montana support thread, which is a fantastic product and served me well, as it was easy for me to find a workaround the battery failure.

So when you plug in the 66i to external power via the USB port, does it go into storage mode or does it charge allowing normal use?

0 4841602 over 4 years ago in reply to PHomero

When I plug my 66i into my Anker Powercore 20100 powerbank using the supplied Anker micro-usb cable, the 66i is charging AND can be used normally - so this indicates that it can also be used this way in case of a battery defect.

As already stated, other charger/cable combinations could indicate data capability to the 66i leading to USB Mass storage mode.

EDIT: I get the same results using my Anker Powercore 10000 Redux with the Anker cable.

0 twolpert over 4 years ago in reply to 4841602

This is, at least partially, the difference between a power brick and a PC. The USB "handshake" that occurs when you plug in the USB cable tells the unit the nature of the thing to which it is connected. If it's a power brick, the unit charges and remains active for use. If it's a PC, the result depends on a setting on the device (which I no longer remember where to find). If you want the device to remain active (as opposed to entering mass storage mode automatically), the "Garmin Spanner" setting will do that. At least, the device will prompt as to whether you WANT to go into mass storage mode. Respond NO to keep the device active. This mode also provides NMEA strings to the PC in case you want to use a mapping program on the PC with the unit.

Note that this behavior should work with a depleted battery. If the battery is actually defective, this may or may not work. You really can't predict the effects of an actual hardware problem with the battery.