MSN Traffic internal receiver battery life?

The MSN® Direct Receiver / GDB 55 plugs into your lighter and uses the battery power from your car.It has nothing to do with the battery life on the unit unless the plug on the receiver that hooks into lighter is bad or you don't have a good contact.Then it would drain the battery from the unit.The battery life of the 255 is 4 hours.

Mattb, I think I understand your question.
It appears the GBD55 has some type of small battery in it as you have noticed, when looking at MSN it shows that battery. Not sure how long it lasts, but it is to keep MSN up to date, not to actually run the Garmin unit.
I do know when I turn off the car, and with it the lighter socket, and come back an hour or two later, the unit is still up to date with the radar and flight info. So that cable battery does appear to keep MSN info up to date.

Yes.... the MSN receivers DO have their own internal battery.

But that's pretty much all I know.

A few questions came to midh when I discovered that fact.

1.) What is the life expectancy of that battery ?

2.) Is it user replaceable ?

3.) Same as your question... how long will the charge hold before it runs out and requires recharging ?

Anyone have any answers to this ?

According to the MSN FAQ, it is supposed to power the receiver for 2-3 days (when removed from power) and it is not replaceable.

Just trying to get an idea of the real life battery run time. I'm trying to determine if I should exchange mine becuase it doesn't hold a charge as long as it should.

I have a c580 with an expired MSN subscription. I would think you should be getting at least 48 hrs of batt life from the cable. Now there are some things to think about. I don't think that there is a HUGE memory chip in the cable - so it isn't going to be storing large amounts of data for the past several days. If you don't have the cable plugged into the garmin, then it has to send the data to the unit.

I always left my cable plugged into the unit and the cig lighter. My data was very fresh in the mornings I did this. So my theory was that it could send data to my gps when it was in "sleep" mode. I know that when I traveled and unplugged the cable from cig lighter, then it took several minutes to refresh.

These are conclusions I came to based on observations I made and may not be factual. Your city and coverage may vary...but probably not by much.

Daniel

Thanks for the info.

But Garmin also says the nuvi battery is not replaceable ( at least not by the user ) and some people have figured out how to do it.

Unless the battery in the MSN receiver is hard sealed in plastic there should be a way to replace it. It may be hard to do if you have to break out a soldering iron though.

You guys are misinterpreting or misreading what the battery does in the MSN receiver. Read the FAQ at MSN direct, #12. It allows the MSN receiver to run independantly for 2-3 days. NOT power the GPS. That is exactly my experience. If fully charged, it will still gather info for the GPS for a couple of days,unplugged from the cig lighter.

Just think about it for a minute. The large battery in the GPS lasts two or three hours or so. How could a small battery power the GPS at all let alone 2 or 3 days?