Best 9” Garmin

[Ed.]

4 hours ago, GregOug said:

Thanks @Hweebe. I don’t think the Lowrance and the Garmin would get on though.

I was under the impression that so long as the devices were on the same network ie: NMEA2000 that they would talk to each other and share resources such as screens and tranducers?

[GregOug]

1 hour ago, Ed. said:

I was under the impression that so long as the devices were on the same network ie: NMEA2000 that they would talk to each other and share resources such as screens and tranducers?

You could well be right Ed. Not sure about transducers though.

[Ed.]

Yep you are probably right about the transducers as in, if you had a chirp transducer and a non chirp display sounder unit, the display sounder unit might not recognize the signal.

[Junky]

5 hours ago, GregOug said:

Thanks @Old Scaley. When I was doing my research yesterday I saw that Garmin bought Navionics out a couple of years ago. They have supposedly combined the best of both charts and created BlueChart G3. These charts are available for Garmin now. I will look into it further.

I have the bluechart g2 vision.

It is very detailed. To much detail when on the highest setting. I had to tone it down a little. The land can even be displayed similar to salalite view on google earth. Stuffs me why you'd use that setting but it's there. 

Can't imagine what the g3 will be like because I don't know what they'd improve from the g2.  

 

[GregOug]

12 minutes ago, Junky said:

I have the bluechart g2 vision.

It is very detailed. To much detail when on the highest setting. I had to tone it down a little. The land can even be displayed similar to salalite view on google earth. Stuffs me why you'd use that setting but it's there. 

Can't imagine what the g3 will be like because I don't know what they'd improve from the g2.  

 

I think the ‘vision’ version is the higher end one though @Junky. The straight g2 was the base version. The g3 version is now the standard and ‘g3 vision’ is the higher level one you pay more for. They may have improved the Garmin mapping since I last used one but I know that the Navionics Platinum+ card is/or was on an entirely different level for mapping. Garmin may well have caught up now that they own the company. Lol.

[GregOug]

5 minutes ago, GregOug said:

I think the ‘vision’ version is the higher end one though @Junky. The straight g2 was the base version. The g3 version is now the standard and ‘g3 vision’ is the higher level one you pay more for. They may have improved the Garmin mapping since I last used one but I know that the Navionics Platinum+ card is/or was on an entirely different level for mapping. Garmin may well have caught up now that they own the company. Lol.

Can you post a screenshot of a g2 vision map, @Junky or the g3 @Old Scaley?

 I posted one of the Navionics Platinum + on here a while ago. I’ll try to find it.

Okay. Found it.

[Junky]

15 minutes ago, GregOug said:

Can you post a screenshot of a g2 vision map, @Junky or the g3 @Old Scaley?

 I posted one of the Navionics Platinum + on here a while ago. I’ll try to find it.

Okay. Found it.

Sure thing. 

I'll snap one tomorrow for you. 

It's similar to that one above. That one looks like the navigation chart. Fishing chart has more contours.

I was trying to work out what's different. It's the depth readings. I'm a meters man.  

 

 

@Ed.

The nmea2000 doesnt work like that. I thought the same thing.

NMEA2000 allows info to be shared such as engine data, VHF coordinate, sound system control etc and displayed on the sounder screen.  

 

The 2 units need to be running the same operating system to share info or act as one. They are linked via a data cable that the retailer sells, or you could probably make your own if you had a diagram available. 

 

I have 2 garmin 820xs linked together via data cable and hooked up to outboard via nmea2000. Works a treat. 

[Old Scaley]

This is from the app:

[Andrew_P]

I reckon keeping the Lowrance as the sounder and navigating by a big screen portable tablet with your choice of app is the way to go @GregOug  just spend some money on a good RAM mount for the tablet. 
 

[GregOug]

11 hours ago, Andrew_P said:

I reckon keeping the Lowrance as the sounder and navigating by a big screen portable tablet with your choice of app is the way to go @GregOug  just spend some money on a good RAM mount for the tablet. 
 

There isn’t really anywhere suitable to do that solution.

[GregOug]

13 hours ago, Old Scaley said:

This is from the app:

And that’s G3? Does the G2 vision look the same @Junky.

[Junky]

Navigation chart. 

 

 

 

Fishing chart. 

 

 

 

 

[Junky]

You can have just land as satellite. 

 

Or the water as well. Bit hard to read though. You can adjust how much overlap it has on the map but I don't use it. 

 

 

[GregOug]

Yeah. The water overlay is pretty useless. I would say of the two, g2 vision looks better than the standard g3. Just my preference.

[shakey55]

On 21/01/2021 at 8:12 PM, GregOug said:

You could well be right Ed. Not sure about transducers though.

Greg. Which transducer do you have at the moment. Is it a Lowrance or an aftermarket like Airmar

[GregOug]

6 hours ago, shakey55 said:

Greg. Which transducer do you have at the moment. Is it a Lowrance or an aftermarket like Airmar

It’s just the Lowrance one, a big transducer about 10 inches long.

[shakey55]

19 hours ago, GregOug said:

It’s just the Lowrance one, a big transducer about 10 inches long.

Do some research, there may be a way to connect the new Garmin to the current transducer. I’m not sure and definitely have no knowledge or experience in this area. Just a thought  good luck  I run a Garmin 75 with B66 Airmar thru hull transducer and more than happy with the performance, even at speed  

https://www.gemeco.com/adapterBL.php

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FYzNJ06VUF11E3PL2oto99

https://www.airmar.com/uploads/SpecApps/airmaremea_mixandmatch_cable_12x18_poster_MR.pdf

Technology is changing daily

[GregOug]

10 hours ago, shakey55 said:

Do some research, there may be a way to connect the new Garmin to the current transducer. I’m not sure and definitely have no knowledge or experience in this area. Just a thought  good luck  I run a Garmin 75 with B66 Airmar thru hull transducer and more than happy with the performance, even at speed  

https://www.gemeco.com/adapterBL.php

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=FYzNJ06VUF11E3PL2oto99

https://www.airmar.com/uploads/SpecApps/airmaremea_mixandmatch_cable_12x18_poster_MR.pdf

Technology is changing daily

I think @Andrew_P has his eye on the transducer and head unit.

[Andrew_P]

Mate if your solution involves keeping the Lowrance then go for it. I’ve thought about upgrading my sounder to one with sidescan but I think I’d put my money towards a minn Kota with spot lock before I upgraded. I reckon you should be able to get close to $1k for your lowrance package. Similar stuff is around that mark from my quick look

[GregOug]

33 minutes ago, Andrew_P said:

Mate if your solution involves keeping the Lowrance then go for it. I’ve thought about upgrading my sounder to one with sidescan but I think I’d put my money towards a minn Kota with spot lock before I upgraded. I reckon you should be able to get close to $1k for your lowrance package. Similar stuff is around that mark from my quick look

I have no intention of keeping the Lowrance. I’ve decided I’m a Garmin man and that’s it. Lol.

[Hweebe]

Hey @GregOug,

I reckon I have some dash space to rehome the HDS 7 live head unit. Let me know when u have it for sale. I’ll try some networking using NMEA2000. 
Cheers

hweebe

[GregOug]

56 minutes ago, Hweebe said:

Hey @GregOug,

I reckon I have some dash space to rehome the HDS 7 live head unit. Let me know when u have it for sale. I’ll try some networking using NMEA2000. 
Cheers

hweebe

No problem. Will do.

[Andrew_P]

Have you got your boat back yet Greg? Curious to see how the upgrades went

[GregOug]

8 hours ago, Andrew_P said:

Have you got your boat back yet Greg? Curious to see how the upgrades went

No mate. Taking their time. Probably a week or two yet. Sigh.

[GregOug]

On 11/02/2021 at 12:18 PM, Andrew_P said:

Have you got your boat back yet Greg? Curious to see how the upgrades went

Okay. I finally got my boat back the day before we were due to head to Tin Can Bay for four nights. I love both the changes I had made.
 

Firstly the anchor winch. It does the job very nicely. The only thing that I found was that you need to reverse the boat to keep some tension on the line otherwise it stops going out once it hits bottom, which it does quite quickly. The anchor is a rather substantial plough anchor with about thirty feet of decent sized chain and a lot of rope after that. The provided bowsprit and fastening plates are also made of heavy grade stainless steel. The bowsprit needs to be sturdy as the anchor secures into its recess with some force and rather quickly if you keep the button pressed too long. We had trouble finding fish so used the anchor many times each day, trying different spots. I began to worry that it might be depleting the batteries but upon checking them they were both at 100%, so that isn’t a problem. Overall, very happy so far with it.

 

Next, the new 9” Garmin. Definitely a good decision for me at least. The larger screen enabled me to split screen and read both the navigation screen and the sounder screen a lot easier than on my 7” one. It reads the bottom well. At one stage we were doing close to 80kph and it was still mapping the bottom. The fish arches (when you do finally find some!) were very discernible and the image was well defined. It did seem to have a fair bit of light clutter on the screen most of the time, which I imagine I could get rid of with some setting changes? The one frustrating thing is that it seems I will need to buy a Garmin G3 Vision card to enable auto-routing, despite the fact that various web articles stated that auto-routing was also available with the standard built in G3.  It certainly didn’t come up as an option when creating routes. Overall though, very happy with it. 

[Mike McLennan]

I was in the wrong area with my post.

[Old Scaley]

Welcome to the site @Mike McLennan. When you sat “at speed”, what speed are you talking about?  Did your boat come with a mounting bracket? If so, that is most likely the optimal site to locate the transducer and then it is only depth and angle you need to think about. I have the same setup on a Sea Jay tinny. I like using an adjustable transducer mount for a number of reasons (you can raise it up easily if you are parking on sand for instance) and this gives you the opportunity to easily fine tune the depth while you are on the water.

The generally accepted method is to run a straight edge down the hull and set the middle of the transducer to the top of the straight edge and then kick it up one notch. But if you have the adjustable mount you can play with it on the water without having to drill more holes. If I get it right I can do up to 20 knots and still have a reasonable picture of the bottom. I may be wrong, but my theory is that some boats create less turbulence than others so are easier to get a good read at speed. Tinnies gave more strokes (I think) so create a bit more turbulence than glass hulls. My opinion only.

Hope this helps. There are plenty of YouTube videos that help, but they don’t usually reference the adjustable mount.

[Mike McLennan]

Thanks very much will give it another go.