Garmin XM Weather Service

A couple of days ago my entire Garmin system stopped working.  I would turn it on, it would run about 15 seconds and then shut down.  After the refrigerator and the air conditioning failures I was aghast.  The Garmin system is by far the single most expensive thing on the boat.  At least, as long as I don't have to replace the diesel engine.  I contacted Garmin customer service and they gave me some debugging tips.  I also provided them with information from the event log.  We eventually isolated the problem to the XM weather and music service receiver.  I disconnected it and the system operated fine.

So of course Garmin contacted me and told me that it was identified as a possible software problem.  Of course they had no date for a fix.  Given that I spent my career explaining to CEO's when things broke that I had no idea how long it would take to fix them because if I knew it would be fixed I expected it to take a while.  So I contacted XM and put my subscription on hold - it costs me about $70 per month.  I no sooner got off the phone when Garmin let me know that XM was putting out some strange signal that was screwing up the receivers and that they had turned it off.  So I hooked everything up again and it worked perfectly.  So I had to call XM back and turn everything back on again.  A great waste of 6 hours.

I do have to compliment Garmin for being on top of the fix.