I plunged into the depths of my Garmin handheld GPS this afternoon. I have a spare one which I'd goosed the NMEA by wiring it up incorrectly some years ago...Luckily I have an aversion to throwing things out :) I'd bought a second hand replacement off ebay which has done sterling service for several years.
This year while clearing off the green crud from the earth pin, the pin just fell off.. no worries, I had the spare so I replaced the back with the one off the original.
When I took it out to play yesterday it would fire up but I could not cycle through the screens. Once stripped down it was obvious what the problem was. The pcb keypad, the brown bit under the screen, was corroded. Unfortunately I couldn't swap that out as it is all one pcb and the good keypad was attached to the none working NMEA.
I gave it a good dose of contact cleaner and wiped off with a glasses cleaning cloth. Looked a lot better, so I left it to dry thoroughly before reassembling, with all the best bits from each, and putting the batteries back in. Touch wood it all seems to work ok now. I will assume that because I've opened it up it will be less water proof than before, so more care required. These things seem to have got very expensive.
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