Nuvi 3597 Lessons Learned

I pack a beanbag mount and the magnetic mount with cord. I slightly disassemble them and put the 3597 proper in a padded zipper bag for carry-on stowage.

Yes, it does cost some weight and space in my carry-on, but for me it is worthwhile.

A few years ago I had a unit fail in the middle of a trip. We muddled our way around and back home with a little trouble, no smart phone in those days. Now I have two 3597, both kept up to date, both in car, swap them around once in a while to get the battery charged. Somewhere buried in the trunk is a spare mount. Never had a failure since getting two units but never been lost in the back streets of DC since!

Good info! Thanks for sharing!

Instead of taking a heavy bean bag, every Garmin comes with the suction cup mount which weighs practically nothing.
Take it !!!

I rather have the bean bag. Never had any problem with the GPS moving.

Thanks for that info.

I knew the mount had a speaker in it, but I thought the unit itself had a speaker.

I would have gone crazy and been cussing up a storm thinking my unit had no "voice".

My advice was for AIR travel !

The 3597 has an internal speaker as well as a speaker built into the mount. When in the mount, the internal speaker is not used, but off the mount it should work although you may have to adjust the volume. If your internal speaker isn't working, something is wrong with your 3597.

Thanks for the info!

You can download manual and keep it on the phone or in the cloud.

Recently on a couple of trips I've seen three or four instances of abnormal behavior from my 3597. Most of these times, it was making much lower loudness than usual, and I believe it was using the internal speaker rather than the mount. In all of these cases it was plugged in to accessory power, and had started up because it saw that power input turn on, not because I pushed the button.

A difference between trips and "at home" is that at home my 2002 Audi A4 has a constantly powered accessory socket. My habit is to unplug the unit when I park in my garage, and only plug it back in when the car has cleared a yard wall, in hopes of reducing initial satellite multipath errors. So at home it always sees a power transient given by sliding the power cable into a socket powered at about 13.5 V, and it never sees engine turnon transients.

My rentals had ignition-on enable accessory sockets. But in my impatience to get started on navigation, I commonly plugged the unit in before my wife started the car, so the unit got a rather different power turnon transient, including that nasty stuff that happens when the electric motor twists the engine. I surmised that for the particular cars I was driving this might account for my seeing 3597 problems I never see at home, and I adopted a new plan of waiting for the car to be started before plugging the cable in. I did not see the problems recur.

I am not confident of my diagnosis (not enough data). I'm posting it here in case someone else might recognize a related observation.

When I go on long trips I bring my cooler which I plug into my 12 volt accessory power outlet. When I stop for gas often I will leave the accessory outlet on during the fill up & notice that the coolers fan doesn't run as fast & immediately notice/hear the difference when I start the engine.

The amount of voltage supplied by my outlet is definitely different when on accessory versus when the engine is running & now wonder if this has any effect on a GPS at boot-up ?

When the GPS is running on accessory power & you start the engine the screen gets brighter, therefore can some units react differently depending the manner in which they initially started ?

Something I neglected to mention is that the problems I saw (audio through speaker, and diminished screen brightness--on one case very greatly diminished to the point I thought it had failed to turn on) persisted, at least until the next on-off cycle, perhaps until a full forced power off.

Thanks, good to know.