From the chief engineer at XM:
I have been talking/emailing a lot of you regarding the 396/496
problems-- thanks to all for both your time and patience. I regret that I haven't been able to fix everything. For now, I don't have any answers, just questions that some of you might be able to help with.
I would appreciate it if anyone can DISPROVE any of the following:
1) The only units affected are Garmin
2) Specifically, only the Garmin "hockey puck" units are affected (i.e,
396/496--- what does the 696 have?)
3) A refresh (refresh.xmradio.com) fixes things EXCEPT for people who DO NOT subscribe to the audio channels.
4) For those who subscribe to weather ONLY (no audio), neither a refresh or activate/deactivate works, all you see is a blank audio screen and/or "waiting for data" in the subscription level box.
5) The problems first started occurring New Year's Day.
How you can further help: I am trying to pinpoint the start time of the "anomaly". Please let me know (offlist is fine) when your box last worked and when you first noticed it not working. Paul Safran says his worked until 5pm-ish New Years Day. Anyone have their box crap out earlier? Anybody have their box crap out mid-flight? And by "crap out"
I don't mean you lost winds aloft for a couple hours, or the METARs went missing, etc.---these are Garmin bugs I already know about---I mean the problems where you are not geting WX data AT ALL, possibly accompanied by a funky subscription level message.
Also, if anyone has a 396/496 that has NOT been affected, please let me know the software version number if you can (displays lower right corner on startup).
Wish I had better information. All I can say is the certified units and most (maybe all, hard to prove a negative) non-Garmin units are fine.
Otherwise, the XM system is fine; the XMWX system is fine. So far, this appears to be related to Garmin 396/496 software only.
Thanks again,
Derek