The Victor Reader Trek GPS navigator, eBook player, pod catcher, and internet radio now can connect to most any Bluetooth speaker. This allows you to listen to podcasts, books, recorded notes, and streaming internet radio through that wireless speaker. We thus, demo here how to pair the Victor Reader Trek with a typical Bluetooth speaker.
In a nutshell, the pairing process goes as follows:
We detail each of these three high level steps next. For this Demo, we’ll be pairing our Trek to the Craig CMA3568 mini Bluetooth speaker, as pictured next.
Hold in the round power button, located on the top left side of the Trek, as shown next, until the unit vibrates. Then, wait for the green power-on lamp to illuminate and the Trek to complete booting; it’s fully booted once the welcome message plays and the electronic chime sounds.
With airplane mode on, the Trek will not be able to connect either to Wi-Fi or to Bluetooth devices. So, make sure that airplane mode is turned off. Detail: When the online status lamp, as shown next, either glows solidly or is flashing, this means that airplane mode is OFF. When OFF, the unit tries to connect to an in-range Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth device.
When the lamp is dark, this COULD mean that airplane mode is on. But it also could mean that, though airplane mode is OFF, that there is no active Wi-Fi connection. The Trek can indeed be offline even though airplane mode is OFF.
So, check that your airplane mode is indeed OFF. How? Press and hold the Online button. The Online button is the circular button with the WiFi symbol in the top row of keys on the front of the unit. Press and hold this button in until the Trek reads its airplane mode status. If it says, “Airplane mode OFF,” then you’re good to go. But if it says, “Airplane mode ON,” then press and hold the Online button again until it says, “Airplane mode OFF.”
Note that you need not be connected to a WiFi network to pair with a Bluetooth speaker. But again, airplane mode MUST be disabled.
We’re using the Craig CMA3568 speaker for this demo, as shown next. For that speaker, the power button is a three-position switch with BT, OFF, and TF positions. To use this speaker as a Bluetooth speaker, we move the switch to the left. This turns the speaker on and places it into pairing mode automatically. No additional button presses needed.
When the speaker is ready to pair, the blue lamp glows and flashes, as shown next.
To do that, make sure the unit is working with the online bookshelves by quickly pressing and releasing the Online button until the unit announces, “Online bookshelves.” Then quickly press and release the * key once and then the 7 key twice (*77). The Trek then announces, “Bluetooth.” Then, quickly press and release the 8 key, until the Trek announces, “Connect to Bluetooth device.” Finally, press the # (pound) key. This starts the Trek scanning for Bluetooth devices, and it announces this by saying, “Scanning for Bluetooth devices.” The scan is complete when the Trek announces the number of Bluetooth devices it discovered, as in, “3 devices found.”
Use the 2 and 8 keys to move up and down in the list of found devices, until the Trek announces the name of your speaker. In this demo it found our speaker, named CMA3568.
With the list cursor currently pointing at your speaker, press the # key. This initiates the connection process. After a short pause, the Trek establishes a connection with the speaker, announcing this by saying, “Connected to <your device name>.” Once the Trek is paired with your speaker, you should now hear any audio that would normally come from the Trek, now emanating from the external Bluetooth speaker that you just successfully paired it with.
Note that as of this writing, the announcements made by the Trek are sometimes wrong. E.g. Sometimes, when you scan for devices, the list of devices it found does not include your speaker. We find that often, doing a second or third scan finds the speaker, and it will appear in the list of Bluetooth devices as expected.
The following also happens at times.
Again, the answer here is to try the scan and connection again. Do this by pressing the * (star) key to leave the Bluetooth menu, then repeat steps 4 through 6 in this procedure. Keep trying until you make the Bluetooth connection.
Please note that once your Bluetooth speaker has been added to the previously paired devices list in the Trek, your Trek will connect to it again, when it’s Bluetooth is turned on and it detects that speaker is activated and in Bluetooth range. With our Craig speaker, we just turn the speaker on and it automatically reconnects, without us having to do anything further.
Check out the audio demo we recorded here, that illustrates via example, how to pair and unpair the Trek from a typical Bluetooth speaker.
The JBL Go 2 speaker by Harman Kardon is a low power, hand-held style unit…
Shows how to fix Honeywell wireless thermostat connection failure issues. You might see these on…
Shows how to connect HP DeskJet 3630 series to WiFi. Note that doing this will…
Here, we show how to reset the Wonderboom speaker version 2. which returns it to…
We give here the JBL Clip reset directions, that return it to its default settings…
The JBL Boom Box JBL by Harman Kardon is a moderate to higher power, boom…