Re: garmin fishfinders
Glad they got bought out- maybe now everyone won't have to send back their junk Sport Pilots and not get service, and their 2 year old sonar units can actually use their mapping chips and not mark their downrigger balls as the bottom regardless of setting, sounds like top quality crap to me- but I'm sure some of their stuff works just fine......their Hydraulic autopilots seem to be ok, little else though.
Lowrance lost their only useful Customer Service Rep so their service has gone back to being NFG. New HDS units are nice, but have seen first hand that they like to freeze up while using structure scan. GPS likes to lose its fix as well- older sonar models, however, seem to work just fine in alot of cases.
I like FURUNO for sonar for 1 very simple reason: when set up properly they work day in and day out with no issues, this is a huge asset when time on the water is limited and you need to maximize time spent- especially when we're fishing Lake Michigan in 200-700 feet of water which is where we spent most of the past 2 summers. Downscan and sidescan is useless for that. For an entry level graph- the 6 series color units are pretty nice.
Let me put it this way: In our town we have several fleets of very effective charter fishermen and they all have one thing in common- their ability to find fish when nobody else is............and they all have Furuno sonar. I had an older (early 90's) sonar that I can't recall the model # that allowed me to target fish that boats near me (friendly boats that I fish in teams with) weren't seeing on their Lowrance units.
Coulda sworn I read somewhere that you actually own Furuno stuff- if you don't like it, then sell it.
