Victor Reader Trek talking GPS player and the Google Home Mini smart speaker, front view of both, side By side.
The Victor Reader Trek GPS navigator, eBook player, podcatcher, and web radio can connect to most any Bluetooth speaker. This allows listening to podcasts, books, recorded notes, and streaming internet radio through that speaker. We thus show here how to pair Victor Reader Trek with Google Home speakers that can act as Bluetooth speakers.
In short, the pairing process goes as follows: First, get the Victor Reader Trek ready for pairing. Next, turn on Bluetooth pairing mode for the target Home speaker via the Google Home app. Finally, on your VictorReader, scan for and connect to your Home speaker. We detail each of these high level steps below. For this demo, we’ll be pairing our Trek to the Google Home Mini Bluetooth smart speaker, as pictured next.
Hold in the round power button, found on the upper left edge of the Trek, as shown next, until the unit vibrates. Then, wait for the green power-on lamp to light up 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 connect either to Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth devices. So, you must assure that airplane mode is turned off. Verify that it is indeed OFF by pressing and holding the Wireless button (the circular button with the Wi-Fi symbol in the top row of keys on the front of the unit), until the Trek announces airplane mode status. If it says, “Airplane mode OFF,” then you’re good to go. If however, it says, “Airplane mode ON,” then press and hold the Wireless button again, and release when the Trek announces, “Airplane mode OFF.”
Note that you need not be connected to a Wi-Fi network in order to pair with a Bluetooth speaker. However, again, airplane mode MUST be disabled regardless of whether you’re using Wi-Fi or not.
See our post, How to Turn On Bluetooth Pairing Mode in Google Home Smart Speakers, for details.
To do that, make sure the unit is working with the online bookshelves by quickly pressing and releasing the Wireless button until the unit announces, “Online bookshelves.” Then quickly press and release the star 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.”
Beware that in version 1.1.3 model 513 Trek, we’ve found that the list of available Bluetooth devices presented by the Trek after scanning, is not always accurate. Specifically, we’ve found devices that it found during previous scans, but were not in range during the current scan. It appears that this version of the firmware does not properly empty the list of discovered devices prior to a new scan. Hopefully, this issue will be address in future Trek firmware updates.
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 Mini speaker, named Office Speaker.
With the list cursor currently pointing at your speaker (Office Speaker in our case here), press the # key. This initiates the connection process. After a short pause, the Trek would normally establish a connection with the speaker, announcing, “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. However, in this demo, we were unable to complete pairing of these two devices, due perhaps, to software incompatibilities between them in the Bluetooth protocol. Again, this is a problem we expect to be cleared up in subsequent Trek firmware releases.
When you’re ready to unpair these devices, see our post How to Unpair the Victor Reader Trek eBook Reader from a Bluetooth Speaker for instructions on how to disconnect your Trek from a currently paired Bluetooth speaker.
Note that as of this writing, the announcements made by the Trek are sometimes misleading. E.g. Occasionally, when you scan for Bluetooth devices, the list of devices it found does not include your speaker. We’ve found that often, initiating a second or third device scan will find the speaker, and it will appear in the list of discovered Bluetooth devices as expected.
It also frequently, that once you’ve found your speaker in the list and press the # key to connect to it, the Trek will initially announce, “Connected to Bluetooth device.” But then a second or two later, it announces, “Failed to connect to Bluetooth device.” Again, the answer here is to attempt the scan and connection again. Do this by pressing the * key to leave the Bluetooth menu, then repeat steps 4 through 6 in this procedure. Keep repeating until you successfully establish a Bluetooth connection.
Please note that once your Google smart 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.
Check out the audio demo we recorded here, that illustrates via example, how to pair and unpair the Trek from a Google Home speaker.
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