Garmin Repair

 

    I have had my Garmin 60CS for over 6 years now and it really is a great piece of kit - OK one drawback is that it can only store about 50Mb of maps, which with the City Select Europe V7 software means that you can load about half of Britain.  When you get to the end of your loaded mapping, you have to connect back to the laptop and download some more - no big deal for most of our trips as I can carry the laptop too.   If I wanted to travel long distances in Europe again on the 'Wing, I might have to have a re-think.  Anyway, all of this connecting and re-connecting via the mini USB on the unit finally produced a fault.  While we were in Germany with the Mini, I had downloaded some more maps from the laptop and as I disconnected the lead the socket itself came a little way out too.  The next time I tried sending maps to the device, I had a communication error but a little fiddling with the socket and lead and holding the two bits together allowed me to send the maps.  I had to repeat this a time or two on our journey home, but was pleased to be able to return home to investigate. 

    When I pulled the unit apart, I was expecting that some wiring had come adrift from between the USB socket and main PCB.  Fortunately, only the socket itself had become detached from a small sub-PCB, which is held in contact with the main board by spring loaded leaf contacts.  The socket cannot come all of the way out of the unit with this fault, as there are two tabs on it which would prevent this.

 

 

    This is what I found when I removed the board, the USB socket has become detached from the PCB, perhaps the soldered joint was a little 'dry' as it would be difficult to get the socket hot enough in the wave soldering process to allow a good bond.  Fortunately there was a definite position where the socket fitted, almost by clicking into position, so although it's rather small, soldering back on was not too difficult with a very small tip on the iron.

 

 

All re-soldered back on and ready for assembly and test.

 

 

 

 

Just to give a bit of an idea of scale, you can easily see that while quite small, it is possible to effect a repair.

 

    Once installed on the main board by 2 small screws, it is quite a simple re-assembly job.  First time re-connected to the laptop by the USB lead, it communicated immediately and has been OK for a couple of months now.  I was resigned to the fact that I had had my moneys worth from it, and could justifiably replace it with the one with the integrated SD card slot (60CSx) it was quite satisfying to repair the original, especially with such a simple but catastrophic fault - I would have been stuck with only the loaded (German) maps! I doubt that Garmin would have been willing to repair such an old unit and at what price?  I know I'm a tight fisted old Yorkshire git, but I'm amazed at how much stuff gets binned for a simple fault - OK, I will concede that not everyone has the stuff to fix things and most repair places are not interested, but you only have to ask around a bit to find someone who can help.

 

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