Lowrance Elite 5 HDI - can I search included waypoints?

TBarCYa

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
781
Before I take this thing out and return it to the store, I figured I'd ask in case I'm missing something...

In my small boat, I have an older Garmin GPSMAP 440s and the thing is great. One feature that I love, but can't seem to do with the brand new Lowrance Elite 5 HDI is search the included waypoints and navigate to them. It's as simple as MENU, NAVIGATE TO, SEARCH and go on the Garmin but when I go to Waypoints on the Lowrance, the list is blank. The Lowrance came with the Navionics Gold card but if I try to load waypoints from the card, there are no waypoints found.

So, is it possible to do what I want with the Lowrance or should I return it? On Sunday we made a 60 mile run to take the boat out for the winter and couldn't search for fuel... Very disappointing.
 

dingbat

Supreme Mariner
Joined
Nov 20, 2001
Messages
15,413
Way points are user generated so I'm not sure what you think you're downloading.

By chance, are you running Garmin Vision card on the 440?
 

TBarCYa

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
781
Perhaps I should have said points of interest rather than waypoints. The Garmin does not have any card installed but to their credit the built in basemap has TONS of points of interest. To be fair, the Lowrance has a bunch of points of interest too, but there's no way to search or navigate to them like the Garmin. I was able to use the arrows to scroll around the basemap and when I was over a POI, it would give me info and I could navigate to it. Just no way to do a search.
 
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TBarCYa

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
781
The word from Lowrance is that it doesn't have the ability to search included POIs. Looks like this beast is going back to the store.
 

TBarCYa

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
781
Really? The customer from hell because the store employee told me it had a certain functionality which I attempted to use then followed up with Internet searches and multiple forum queries and finally sent an inquiry to the manufacturer who verified that the functionality doesn't exist all before returning it to the store to replace it with a model that is confirmed has the functionality? If that's your customer from hell, I'd hate to see what you call the guy that buys an item and keeps it for 29 days before returning it for a different model repeatedly just to try them all out. I'm pretty sure I went above and beying to give this thing a chance before realizing that it doesn't do what I need it to. Please shove your customer from hell comment up your....
 

Star

Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Sep 21, 2010
Messages
481
TB
I feel your pain, The people that are designing the new stuff have been sitting in a room with a computer all their lives and have never been out to use what they have made!!! I purchased a new Garmin to replace my 8 year old GPSmap 398. I used the old one to travel all over the eastern US with it mounted on the dash of my van. It has all the lakes in the continental US. The detail on the built in map detail was about half as good as the old 398. So I tried to buy the high detail maps that they were promoting only to find they didn't have any of lake Champlain, which is one of the primary lake that I am on. I also found that US road navigation was useless because as you zoom in on a map the road detail disappears so you can't even use it. The first unit I got would have internal voltage sags to 11.6 volts with a 29 series 29 deep cycle connected directly to the factory cable. This voltage sag only occurred when the transducer was attached. The primary reason I replaced it was to improve the finder performance. Yes it did have a much higher resolution display, but it didn't track fish worth a darn!!!! Seven years of technology is taking me backward? By the way the unit has Wi-Fi, WOW!

The real Customer from HELL
 

TBarCYa

Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
781
I'm looking at a Garmin because I know I can search the POIs and the WiFi would be nice if it offers integration with a smartphone. Hopefully the new one works as well as the old one.
 

Star

Chief Petty Officer
Joined
Sep 21, 2010
Messages
481
DO NOT ASSUME THAT.. I am very unhappy with my new echo 50s in all respects. What model are you looking at?
 
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