Garmin Zumo 550 - New Life

"Sudden Death Syndrome" ... I'm pretty sure that is what the condition has been dubbed.

It was during the Detroit to Key West ride in March of 2016 that my Zumo 550 went black - dead !

It would not power up at all. This happened on the way back north after departing from Key West while skirting the Emerald Coast.

A screen shot of the Zumo 550 not too long before it's demise.



Upon returning, I tried the various reboot procedures - but to no avail. At this point the GPS unit was deemed - doomed forever - and chucked into a corner of the garage.

After that, a Garmin Zumo 665 had been purchased, which got me through the remainder of the year.

 Anyway, the purpose of this post is to share a recently found company who repairs GPS units and gives them a second chance at life.

After a phone call to the owner and an email (which was very clear and complete) he sent me outlining the whole procedure of shipping, diagnosing, and repairing the unit - I was very confident in doing business with Short Tronics of Mankato, Minnesota.

 Throughout the whole process, the correspondence with Chris was immediate and amazing. Top notch customer service !

My bubble wrapped Zumo 550 arrived in the mail today. It was a pleasant surprise to push the power button and see it all aglow and communicating with the satellites while displaying a map again. 

The diagnosis was a burned out power chip along with the internal backup battery being bad. The cost to repair this was $66.95.

My rubber buttons were still in good shape and did not show any signs of cracking -  yet - but because this is such a common problem I had them go ahead and perform the "rubber button repair" for an additional $17.95.

They do not actually replace the buttons, but back-fill them with a special two-part urethane which prevents them from cracking and coming out in the future.

Then I inquired about updating the map set on this unit, as it is an older unit in addition to the fact that I had bought it used; so the maps were a little dated.

They updated the maps for $12.00 and installed a 4 Gigabyte SD card (necessary to holds the maps) for another $12.00.

So far so good. This unit can stay dedicated to the Honda ST-1300 now. We will see how it holds up when riding season kicks off.

The GPS repair company is -

Short Tronics
51612 US Highway 169 - Mankato, Minnesota 56001-6584
Chris Short - President (612-326-4364) www.PalmDr.com