New GPS/bottom machine combo question

[phatdaddy]

Yeah skunk, thats the same conclusion i came to. My grandmother used to say. Too much sugar for a dime. Just thought it would be cool to be able to link.

This one has the blue tooth, i downloaded the active captain for updates, but haven t played with it much.

Right now i have a furuno bottom machine gps combo, but it is too hard to navigate the machine. I use an old garmin for the gps and it is much more user friendly. The screen finally went dark, I was looking at some used garmins for 200-300 and West Marine had these with txducer for 699.it is the CV not the GT , but should be ok in less the 150’, from what i ve read

[phatdaddy]

got it installed yesterday, not too bad. still not sure if the txducer is right. loses bottom over 30mph.

anyway just went out to some known spots to check out the sidescan kinda tricky to know what you're looking at, but I got a little more comfortable as I used it



this is a sailboat in about 25 ft of water that I grouper fish on. I was amazed it came out so clear.
I also went by some nav towers in the bay, nothing showed up, kinda weird what marks and what doesn't.

Skunk. I have my numbers on a micro sd card from my old Lowrance, will they import to the Garmin of will I have to go through GPS BABBLE?

[SkunkBoat]

It will have to be in the garmin ".adm" file format in order to load into the unit from an SD card.
Get garmin Homeport software free from Garmin.
You "might" be able to import waypoints from your Lowrance SD card and then save as a Garmin adm file.

Lowrance might be a .gpx file type

I went from Lowrance to Garmin too but I seem to remember having a problem related to not having an SD card smaller than 2 GB. Unfortunately I have chronic "CRS" disease and can't remember how I got around it.

I actually just went thru my annual data cleanup in HomePort. I dump out my waypoints to an sd card as "2019data" then rename and edit new waypoints that are still default numbers

Even if you can't get them imported, it will be WAY EASIER to enter and edit them in Homeport using a PC and a keyboard rather than in the menu of the unit with buttons.
I had paper charts of artificial reefs and I entered every wreck/rockpile/subway car/tank I could find numbers for. When I get on a wreck, I mark the edges and high spot. If I get on something and my original entry was off, I mark the correct spot spot with a default waypoint and clean it up in Homeport over the winter. I have hundreds of waypoints.

You have Actice Captain available to you. I don't know if that is another way to get data in and out in different formats.

[3 Squids]

I can’t help you with advice but I too bought this unit. I’m assuming you got it for the $699 Black Friday sale a few places had. Funny thing is I actually bought 2 because I wanted one for each boat, 1-My V20 and 2-My Egg Harbor. I didn’t realize until later the the unit quick disconnects without having to unplug or unscrew anything. So I could of bought 1, bought another cradle and swapped it out seeing as I keep them in my truck anyways. But what’s done is done and now I’m considering buying 2 cradles and having the ability to have 2 units on whichever boat I’m using that day. The empty cradles are $60 each so that’s way cheaper then buying 2 more units. Then I can have a full 9” chartplotter and 9” sonar.

[phatdaddy]

I have about 600 + numbers and probably 400 are no good. On the older lowrance, it was about 5 steps to delete while on the move. That s what i like about the touchscreen of this one. Pull up to a spot, if its not there, tap twice, it s gone. When i was running stone crab traps, i would mark locationa, so i have a couple of hundred ghost pot numbers at least.

I need to do a lot of housekeeping,


Squids, that would be a great plan. I got mine at west marine for 699. It s a lot of technology for the buck. I never was a fan of garmins bottom machine. Always had furuno or Raytheon. I mainly got this for the chartplotter, but in my first outing, i was very impressed,

My biggest problem is the very limited space on the V20 dash