My 2006 RL GPS has developed Alzheimer's. It works most of the time, however about 6 months ago on a long trip we stopped for gas and when I restarted the engine instead of the GPS asking if I wanted to continue it had a low resolution image of the current location. I went to the Address book and it was totally blank! I went to previous destinations and found 3 addresses I needed and added them to the address book. Now I had the three addresses and I could ask for a routing to them. After stopping a few more times magically the Full address book appeared? The next time this happened the address book with three entries appeared and the cycle started again. The dealer applied ever fix they had to the GPS (none of which addressed my problem) and assured me that it was fixed. It was not!
I called Alpine and a very knowledgeable individual said that he had never heard of this problem, however, he was very interested in the problem. I advanced my theory that the system was occasionally unable to address the data. I asked where the data was stored and he said non-volatile solid state memory and not on the DVD. The interesting part is it is located in the trunk mounted GPS DVD reader!
Has anyone else experienced this problem or a similar one?
Jim

 

Recently, I had an issue of the car losing my profile, Driver 1. And it would lock me out of several functions, address book being one, handsfree link being another, and defaulting to a 1/8 mile scale on the map.

After constantly unlinking and relinking, I changed the batteries in the fob (two CR 2025) and the problem was fixed for $4.49!

This does not exactly sound like your issue, but it may be something to look at, since the batteries are getting on 4 years old, and I think the manual says the life expectancy is 2 years.

 

I would agree with Chas' assessment. It could be losing the Driver customization features by not communicating with the fob.

Does the NAVI respond to the settings set for Driver 2 fob? If so, it is most likely the Driver 1 fob whether it is a linking or battery issue.

The personalized settings you make with the RL, NAVI address book, climate control settings, radio stations, memory settings are stored in the flash memory. The Driver 1 or 2 Fob, when recognized, calls on these settings stored and the RL reacts accordingly.

If the fob is not the root of the issue, it is possible that the NAVI drive's flash memory has been corrupted in some manner. By chance has the DVD drive unit been shocked by trunk luggage or damaged in some way?

 

I've already replaced the batts in the Fob about 12 months ago.

Jim

 

The Drive has never been dammaged.

Jim