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GARMIN AERA 660 – BATTERY CONDITION

chrispratt

Well Known Member
For those readers who fly with a Garmin Aera 660, this might of interest.

I’ve noticed on my last few flights that the battery condition indicator on my Aera 660 shows the battery is only half-charged at the end of a flight (see pic below).



The first time I noticed this was after a short flight so I thought maybe it needed more time to charge, but after my 1.6 hour flight yesterday the indicator looked the same at one-half charge.

I took the unit home and tried charging there but it wouldn’t budge past the half-charged state.

A check of the 660 pilot manual indicated that the battery might need to be re-conditioned by draining it all the way and recharging from there. So, I left the 660 on until the battery was fully drained (took about an hour). I then used the supplied USB connector and plugged it in overnight from one of my Apple chargers. It took several hours (the manual says four hours but I think that might be when using a car charger type source (12V) versus my Apple charger which I think is lower voltage 5V). At any rate it showed full charge in the morning (photo below), so I think that worked.



If you use a 660 and haven’t checked lately, you might want to check the condition of the battery so you don’t get caught with a dead battery on a trip.

Note for [email protected] if you see this: While waiting for the unit to recharge I cruised the Garmin site to try find a replacement battery and what it might cost. None of my searching on Garmin.com found anything relating to a lithium-ion replacement battery even though I was searching using the part number described in the Garmin manual (go to http://buy.garmin.com 010-11654-03) . Maybe there’s a special site for this? I’d love to know for future reference.

FYI: I also searched Amazon, Ebay, and a few other sites from Google Search and while they all showed a result for the battery, all sites said they were “out of stock” or “out of production”. I hope this is just a “supply chain” issue and not permanent. Prices on the non-Garmin sites ranged from $26 to $96 for a replacement unit (Ebay was the $96 site.)

Cheers.

Chris
 
I purchased 660 new at Sun n Fun, noticed it takes some time to charge but have not used it enough to see any issues. I will drain it and charge it to see what happens. I am also interested in the battery replacement.
 
I purchased 660 new at Sun n Fun, noticed it takes some time to charge but have not used it enough to see any issues. I will drain it and charge it to see what happens. I am also interested in the battery replacement.

Since my earlier post, I've seen this battery advertised at battery specialty shops that are widely available. Apparently it is used in a number of Garmin devices. The price is in line with the $26 range. So check locally.

To be clear on my earlier post, the half-charged condition only appeared recently after several years of use. I think it might be due to my downloading my chart update subscriptions without having the unit plugged in to anything. The downloads take a good 45 minutes to upload all the charts every month using just my home wifi and the unit's battery. When done uploading the unit would typically show about half battery. So after using that procedure for the past couple of years, I may have conditioned the battery to that charge state.

Chris
 
Good info Chris. Mine is about the same age.
Will do the reconditioning.
Thanks.

BTW, you do movies on the side ???
 
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