FWIW - I was in the market for a fishfinder/gps/chart plotter and researched it quite a bit. The Lowrance HDS models were the ones that seemed to have everything I was looking for, but I did read a whole bunch of posts where people talked about how bad the customer service is and they would wait on the phone for hours just to talk to someone.
After much thought and research, I decided to bite the bullet and get the Lowrance HDS-5 (yea, I know, I will wish I had a bigger screen)
When I was installing it, uh-oh, I had a question already that I couldn't find an answer to - here we go I thought. I called the 800 number and within 5 minutes I had a live person on the phone telling me everything I wanted to know.
Don't know if I was lucky or if they have just gotten better, but it was not an issues at all for me. I would have to give them an A+.
1st experience - One of the main reasons I wanted a new ff/gps/ chart plotter was for the chart plotter. I am new to the main lake I fish at which is Tims Ford in middle Tennessee. It is around 10,500 acres with like 246 miles of shore line. I guess if you grew up on it or have been on it a lot it isn't that hard to get around, but in the day time I was getting confused, at night time I ended up having to use google earth on my phone to find my way back to the boat dock.
1st day I installed it I headed out about an hour before dark, mainly just to play with my new "toy" (this is not a toy). It came with the inland lakes loaded already, so I had a nice map of the lake and took off for some areas a fair distance away which I had not been to by boat yet as I didn't want to get lost.
I am sure any chart plotter with maps installed would do the same, but the chart plotter alone was worth the money($700). Of course it was still daylight out so that made it pretty easy. I tinkered around for a couple of hours and it ended up being around 10:00 pm when i decided to head back. There is no possible way i could have ever found my way back without this - I am serious - zero chance. Go to google eearth and look up Tims Ford lake in Tennessee. Tho it looks like a giant river (it basically is), especially at night, all of the shoreline looks the same and you can not even see many of the turnoffs until you are right on top of them. All of the creeks look the same to me.
Enter the HDS-5. A bigger screen would have been nicer to set my route, but it still only took me minutes to set up about 10 legs for the trip back home. I ended up having some boat trouble while I was out and my Nav lights kept blowing fuses, so all I had were the black lights on the rub rail of my boat. Fortunately the moon was out, but man, it could not have been any easier. I love this thing. Never a thought about where I was going and if I made a wrong turn. No one else was out on the lake so I was going around 30 mph as I had set up all of the legs in the route so I stayed in the main channels, never having to get close to shore.
Even if it is not the Lowrance, if you do not have a chart plotter, get one. They are worth their weight in gold unless I guess you are on a smaller lake you know very well.
I still need to work on my sonar reading skills, but I am going to give this unit a 5 star rating so far and that includes customer service, which is something you don;t see too often on a Lowrance product.
I ended up going with the 5" screen because I figured if I ever do get to upgrade to the LSS-1 module, I will get it in a package with another HDS-5 and would end uo with as much screen real estate as the 10" version, yet still have less money in it. I'm not the richest fisherman around tho so I imagine it will be quite a while before I can do something like that, but in the mean time, I am really, really happy. Without the HDS-5, I could still be on Tims trying to find my way home. Now I just need to go find some structure....
After much thought and research, I decided to bite the bullet and get the Lowrance HDS-5 (yea, I know, I will wish I had a bigger screen)
When I was installing it, uh-oh, I had a question already that I couldn't find an answer to - here we go I thought. I called the 800 number and within 5 minutes I had a live person on the phone telling me everything I wanted to know.
Don't know if I was lucky or if they have just gotten better, but it was not an issues at all for me. I would have to give them an A+.
1st experience - One of the main reasons I wanted a new ff/gps/ chart plotter was for the chart plotter. I am new to the main lake I fish at which is Tims Ford in middle Tennessee. It is around 10,500 acres with like 246 miles of shore line. I guess if you grew up on it or have been on it a lot it isn't that hard to get around, but in the day time I was getting confused, at night time I ended up having to use google earth on my phone to find my way back to the boat dock.
1st day I installed it I headed out about an hour before dark, mainly just to play with my new "toy" (this is not a toy). It came with the inland lakes loaded already, so I had a nice map of the lake and took off for some areas a fair distance away which I had not been to by boat yet as I didn't want to get lost.
I am sure any chart plotter with maps installed would do the same, but the chart plotter alone was worth the money($700). Of course it was still daylight out so that made it pretty easy. I tinkered around for a couple of hours and it ended up being around 10:00 pm when i decided to head back. There is no possible way i could have ever found my way back without this - I am serious - zero chance. Go to google eearth and look up Tims Ford lake in Tennessee. Tho it looks like a giant river (it basically is), especially at night, all of the shoreline looks the same and you can not even see many of the turnoffs until you are right on top of them. All of the creeks look the same to me.
Enter the HDS-5. A bigger screen would have been nicer to set my route, but it still only took me minutes to set up about 10 legs for the trip back home. I ended up having some boat trouble while I was out and my Nav lights kept blowing fuses, so all I had were the black lights on the rub rail of my boat. Fortunately the moon was out, but man, it could not have been any easier. I love this thing. Never a thought about where I was going and if I made a wrong turn. No one else was out on the lake so I was going around 30 mph as I had set up all of the legs in the route so I stayed in the main channels, never having to get close to shore.
Even if it is not the Lowrance, if you do not have a chart plotter, get one. They are worth their weight in gold unless I guess you are on a smaller lake you know very well.
I still need to work on my sonar reading skills, but I am going to give this unit a 5 star rating so far and that includes customer service, which is something you don;t see too often on a Lowrance product.
I ended up going with the 5" screen because I figured if I ever do get to upgrade to the LSS-1 module, I will get it in a package with another HDS-5 and would end uo with as much screen real estate as the 10" version, yet still have less money in it. I'm not the richest fisherman around tho so I imagine it will be quite a while before I can do something like that, but in the mean time, I am really, really happy. Without the HDS-5, I could still be on Tims trying to find my way home. Now I just need to go find some structure....
