®
1 L 2 OWR ANCE
mysteries of
Story & photos
BY KEN SAURET
T
he questions about Lowrance electronics
never seem to cease. These “boat mount-
ed computers” have so many features and
can do so much more than the average angler will put to the test that I’m certain that I have
some job security in writing these articles.
Our daily computers, laptops and desktops that we
use at home, are changing at exponential speeds, so it
kind of makes sense that the technology running our
fishing electronics would change rapidly also, and they are!
It seems like the engineers who write the
software for our home computers are finding more
and more ways to “improve” them and the software
engineers at Lowrance find themselves in the same
situation.
With every passing year these “fish finders” are
doing more complex jobs for us. Finding fish, water
temperature and best of all, finding structure where
the fish live. This last feature, finding structure, is
where the most advances are coming.
In my opinion, this is far more important that just
finding fish. If you fish in their home, the structure,
you will catch fish you never saw on your electronics.
Although as good as our modern electronics are, at
least we still have to cast our lures out into the water
to catch a fish!
That’s enough of my rambling. Let’s get to the
meat of why I write about Lowrance electronics.
Answering some of the questions that I frequently
see, allows more people to learn from these
exchanges.
QUESTION #1
Can you link an HDS 7 with an Elite 7? If so, what will it share and if both units have
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SOLVED
the same map chip installed and a waypoint is marked, will it show up on the maps on both graphs?
ANSWER #1
You can link an HDS unit to an Elite unit via a NMEA 2000 network. The HDS unit and the Elite unit can be different screen sizes. With this network you can share Waypoints, GPS antennas, remote temperature sensors and other compatible NMEA devices. A NMEA 2000 network will not share any mapping data or sonar signals.
As for the map chip part of the question, when a Waypoint is placed on either of the units you are marking a longitude and latitude in the unit itself, not on the map card. This has nothing to do with the map data that is visible in either unit. If, for example, you removed all mapping data from the units your chart screen would be a plain blue screen but the waypoint would still appear on the screen. Your boat icon would still appear on the screen when you got on the water. You could still navigate to the waypoint with out any mapping data being displayed.
If you look ahead of the boat you can make sure that you are still on the water, you should never use these units for Navigation completely, always look up and watch where you are going. With all that being said both units would need to be turned on and set to “send and receive waypoints”.
QUESTION #2
I have heard that if I experiment
with different menu settings and get
lost messing with all of the different settings that are on my HDS unit, I can reset the unit