696 Clock battery replacement

[sailvi767]

It looks like the clock battery on my 696 is about done. After not flying for a few days it can take 30 minutes to get a position fix. The cold weather seems to have triggered the issues witch makes sense given battery performance. Firmware is updated.
I have searched the internet and there is lots of info on clock battery replacement other garmin products including the 396/496. I can't find a thing on the 696. Has anyone tried a do it yourself approach or will it have to go back to garmin to get a 2 dollar battery for 400 bucks?

George

[bhester]

If it was me I'd check with the Garmin guys that visits VAF. Email them directly and see if they can help you out first. Steve helped me work through a GDL39 problem. I've seen post from both Matt and Steve on here.

Garmin G3X Support
g3xpert@garmin.com
1-866-739-5687 - 7 to 7 Central Time M to F
Please email us for support instead of using Private Messaging due to the limitations of the latter.

[g3xpert]

Originally Posted by sailvi767

It looks like the clock battery on my 696 is about done. After not flying for a few days it can take 30 minutes to get a position fix. The cold weather seems to have triggered the issues witch makes sense given battery performance. Firmware is updated.
I have searched the internet and there is lots of info on clock battery replacement other garmin products including the 396/496. I can't find a thing on the 696. Has anyone tried a do it yourself approach or will it have to go back to garmin to get a 2 dollar battery for 400 bucks?

George

Hello George,

There is a small board mounted battery inside the 696, but it only backs up the real time clock, and the real-time clock is also backed up by the main battery, so you would need to have both batteries die before you lost the real-time clock.

Even if the real time clock is lost, it gets the current time pretty quickly from the GPS signal and starts up with generally a very small delay.

I have a test 696 here that has both of these batteries bad, and every time I start it up (using external power) and go to the INFO page I watch it start with an incorrect time and then get the current time and a 3D GPS position lock in under a minute using just the internal GPS antenna.

You might check the info page on startup and see if 1) it has the current time and 2) how strong your GPS signal is.

Please contact us via email or phone if we can help in any way.

Thanks,
Steve