NH Tim

I was up a bit west of Augusta around Winthrop. A bunch of great lakes around there. I spend a bit of time up there in the summer. Good luck with the Elite 7. It nice having new electronics. I've been running a couple old lowrance x65 from the early 90's, which barely worked. I could get an occasional depth reading on a scrambled screen every now & then, and now I can't keep my eye off the screen. Some of the smaller lakes have some nice structure out in the middle that the down imaging picks up well. Took one cast on the first hump I marked and pulled up a nice LM. It was kind of funny.

I just went through the same thing for my Ranger. Actually still in the process of adding a new bow unit and new console unit. After looking at various units for a while I landed on the Garmin 70dv (7" touch) for a GPS/Fishfinder at the console. Over the $700 budget though especially with side scan. Initially I was only looking at Lowrance & Humminbird, but the new Garmin units are at the top of their class. The imaging is excellent and they are ridiculously easy to use with the touchscreen. Their lakevu hd ultra charts are pretty impressive, at least for the handful of Max Def charted lakes in the area. I did actually buy the Humminbird 688ci hd before the garmin. It's actually still in the box which I need to return. It looks like a great unit for $450 and for a 5" Down Imaging only unit, I think I would have been happy. It can't be networked with another unit though and the Garmin really impressed me. I also fish for LM & SM Bass in Maine & NH in anywhere from 1' to 30' of water. Just got back from 9 days in Maine, which was my first trip with the new unit. Currently I only have the DownVu, which is their Down Imaging technology and it worked great for identifying humps, valleys, under water weedbeds, rocks and whatever else might be down there. It works well at high speed too, so it was great for marking interesting areas while running to visit later. It just doesn't cover alot of ground like the side imaging does. Not a huge help when working a shoreline except to get the depth and temp and find the drop off point. Sidescan would reveal some more useful info on underwater structure out to the sides that that downvu doesn't pick up. Say there is a boulder field in castable range off to the side, or an underwater tree. If you fish the same lake most of the time you can probably find the structure with just down imaging. It may just take a few extra trips. I'm ordering another one for the Bow and I think I'm also going to get the SideVu addon, but it's a hefty price tag. I think you can get away with 5" if only doing down imaging. You'll want at least 7" for side.