Users of Garmin's portable datalink receivers—the GPSmap 396, 496 and 696—got their weatherlink back in service by mid-morning on Wednesday, Garmin told AVweb. An undetermined number of users lost access to weather data after New Year's due to technical issues, which Garmin and XM declined to explain in detail.

Evidently, the outage affected only users who subscribe to data only—data and audio subscribers, we're told, never lost service. The outage also impacted only the puck-type antennas used in portables; panel-mount XM-based weather equipment was unaffected. By late Wednesday, AVweb had heard from several datalink subscribers who confirmed their weather service was back online.