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How things go wrong: Garmin GDL 51 firmware updates

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Canuck

David Megginson
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This post isn't meant to trash Garmin — I've been happy with their customer service — but just to show how easily things can go wrong trying to coordinate multiple products on multiple platforms.

I used to update the firmware in my portable GDL 51 SiriusXM receiver (a great device, BTW) using Garmin WebUpdated from a laptop. When I tried a few days ago, however, WebUpdater was showing no updates available, even though the GDL 51 itself was telling me to upgrade the firmware from 2.09 to 2.11.

I sent an email to tech support, and they told me that I can now do the updates directly in Garmin Pilot—in other words, as soon as Garmin Pilot for iOS added the feature, Garmin removed it from WebUpdater. Unfortunately, they forgot to check if the new firmware-update feature was also available in Garmin Pilot for Android. So, because of a failure of communication between two different teams, GP Android users currently have no way to update their firmware.

I imagine that there was a bit of a panic email thread behind the scenes, since no one had realised this problem until I got in touch. Garmin just emailed me to say that they hope to have the update feature in the next version of GP for Android (probably as a hotfix, since it's a different major version number).

These things happen—I've been on the other end of them before. What's obvious to a user (who has just one combination of products/services to use) isn't always obvious to the vendor (who has an exponential combination of possibilities).


D
 

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