Contacting Garmin

Bartman

Bartman

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New Jersey, USA
I've been surfing the Garmin site the last few weeks and it's aggravated me that there's no easy way to reach out to them via their Contact Us link. It's all obfuscation and diversion! lol

Back at it today I stumbled upon this link which might be on every page, I just never noticed it. When you click the link it takes you to a page where you can schedule a virtual meeting with a Garmin rep to go through all of your questions before placing an order.

Here's the link so it can be easily referenced after they decide to hide it because we're all bombarding them with questions. lol

Schedule an Expert | Installations | Garmin

Garmin
www.garmin.com www.garmin.com

No, I'm not being compensated in any way by Garmin but I do regret not buying Garmin stock back when all of those hand-helds starting showing up in every student's flight bag!
 
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I belong to the Beechcraft forum even though I don't own a Beech. They have a column devoted to avionics and you can search through there. One of the Garmin tech reps. (Trek A. Lawler, Supervisor, Garmin Aviation Field Service Engineering, Aviation Product Support ) monitors the site and will answer most any problem or questions. The forum is free and you don't have to own a Beech product. Give it a look.
Beechtalk.com
 
Thanks for the tip! I think I have an account there from my brief time as a potential Bonanza owner. :)
 
I have an interference problem with the otherwise stunningly superior GTR-200. Its RF squelch circuitry is inadequate to prevent approach control interference when in the north pattern at MYF.

I have been bugging Garmin for over two years, anf have received responses from Lee Moore and Tim Larberg in the past. I am now on their "ignore" list - they say the radio is designed to pick up signals from 100 miles out. Just what I need in busy SoCal airspace.

They no longer give me the courtesy of a " don't bother us" e-mail.

So now I am trying to get the FAA to move the offending frequency. I don't know if that will work, because no other radio has this problem. But the nice FAA guy in charge of frequency allocation is meeting me Wednesday.
 
I recently used that very link and service to get some advice about bringing my panel out of the 1970’s (literally - they’re all original radios except for the GTX 345 transponder I had to install). The northeast regional sales rep spent 45’ on the phone with me in a very candid conversation that was NOT all about how Garmin could extract maximum dollars from me. He said where he thought it made sense to spend money and where it didn’t. It was time well spent.
Rick
 
Garmin makes brilliant stuff. They are lapping everyone else in the avionics industry. But they also infuriate me with their closed ecosystem and lack of interoperability. It works for them, so they have no incentive to switch, but it sucks.

Example: my GDL 50 was bricked after a recent firmware update. Because the device is more than one year old, Garmin tech support told me tough luck, no way to fix it, buy a new one. Now that is nonsense, I know darn well it is technically feasible to reflash the ROM, it just didn't make business sense for them to maintain the support capability to do so.

Call me a stubborn old man, but I'm not going to pay another $700 to Garmin for an identical device because they won't fix my first one. Screw them. So I started looking for other devices, and found that no other portable device works with Garmin Pilot.

That pissed me off so much that I switched to I Fly GPS and bought a Stratux kit for $160.
 
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