"Charles B. Summers" wrote in
:

Going to send my Garmin 162 GPS in for warranty repairs tomorrow. The
screen is starting to fade out, making my have to turn the contrast
way up in order to see the screen. After a little while, the thing
will just shut itself off.

I called the tech support people and was surprised that someone
actually took my call without me having to sit on hold for an hour.
That in itself was a blessing... Anyway, I've gotten my RMA number and
the guy said that the turn around time after they receive it is about
7 days. Hopefully, I'll have it back soon.

I figured that I'd post this here in case you guys had a problem with
any of your units and you are wandering what to expect. For the
record, I'm sending mine out tomorrow, and I'll keep y'all posted with
a few details. I'm not expecting any trouble, and if all goes
smoothly... I'm going to finally replace my front finder with that
Garmin 240 that I've been wanting! The 160 is still running strong as
ever on the console!




I have had nothing but fantastic experience with Garmin Warrantee
service.

When I bought my unit at Amazon for an unbelievable price (essentially,
etrex legend for $150, not counting the $50 rebate) I had some
interesting back and forths with Amazon. First, shipping kept getting
delayed until I was out of the rebate period. A call to amazon, after
getting kicked up enough levels, resulted in Amazon crediting me the
rebate amount. Next, the unit arrived with a non-functioning display.
Amazon swiped that out with a new unit really quickly for me.

After the warrantee ended, the unit started spontaneously shutting off
periodically-- it probably happened first during the warrantee period,
but I thought it was bad batteries or something, and then it stopped
showing the problem altogether, so I thought it was OK. In any case, it
started dying on me out of warrantee.

I called customer service. I was real nice on the phone. I told him
that my first unit, after some availability problems, arrived broken, and
my second unit had out-of-warrantee problems. Then I told him that if I
had to buy a new unit, because of the problems I had with these two
units, I would be unlikely to replace it with a Garmin (because of
quality control issues), but if they would cover this under warrantee,
they'd have a customer for life. Simply put, I asked them to offer my
warrantee service for an out of warrantee item, just because I wanted
them to. Long story a hair shorter, they replaced my Garmin for free
with a brand new unit. Because of firmware and hardware upgrades, it
seems even better than my first.

Scott