Wondering if its first-generation quality will be as good as Humminbird's 360 Imaging - Or, if like Humminbird and Lowerance trying to play catch-up on Livescope - will it take a few generations until as good? Anyone planning to purchase?

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/newsroom/press-release/marine/garmin-unveils-360-degree-sonar-with-revolutionary-spy-pole/

It looks like they have gone around the HBird patent by making a pole that spins the transducer rather than spinning the transducer itself (a very minor distinction, but I'm sure their legal team has studied it). Or maybe they paid a license to HBird. Either way, I'm sure it will be pretty good from the start. The reason HBird was behind on FFS at the start was a hardware limitation. They chose to dumb down ML1 so that it was usable on the Helix systems which only had som uch power and bandwidth. When they upgraded to ML2 they caught up to LVS32 and beyond it. It's arguably as good as LVS34. I would suggest that the garmin 360 should be pretty good from the start and with the benefit of allowing you to put a livescope xD on the pole. That gives a separate control of the FFS from the motor which will be a benefit to some.

I know it's just a demo video but this is really cool.

I've started seriously thinking about an upgrade this summer - this and a big screen.

Maybe I missed it on the video but does the 360 scan once and then the FFS overlay and it’s the FFS that keeps updating or does the 360 keep scanning too and just doesn’t have the black section like HB 360?

Either way, pretty cool technology and hopefully it’s similar to what the video shows. We all know how that goes.

The OneVu (360) scan has 3 modes (Manual, Constant, Auto). If you have it in Constant, then the SpyPole is always rotating and scanning. Auto Mode is really cool and only scans when you move the boat and need to scan new areas of the bottom. If you are relatively still when in Auto Mode, then after the initial 360 scan, the SpyPole will quit rotating and continue to display the data from the single scan.

It looks very cool. I'm impressed. I love the way it builds a persistant map of the bottom. That's an innovation that Humminbird will need to match. 360 is one of the reasons I've stayed with Humminbird for many years.

@Todd Driscoll you can’t leave us with just that. You’ve obviously used it, you have to give us real world info on it. 😁

I spent several months beta testing the SpyPole and I'm really impressed with it, absolutely loaded with features. For most of my testing I used it with Echomap Ultra 2s and had a LVS 34 in Perspective mounted on the Pole (along with the GT360) and a LVS 34 in Forward on the Force Pro. I used SpyLink Mode the most, where the Pole mirrors the direction of the Force Pro. When in this mode, when you Anchor Lock the Force, the pedal then automatically controls the direction of the SpyPole. The scanning of the OneVu mode with the GT360 provides really clear and useful images. The SpyLock feature is also really useful, allowing you to lock the Pole on a particular waypoint, hard spot, brushpile, etc., while still moving and searching with the LVS 34 on the Force.

I watched Jason Christie's video on it when it launched and it's pretty slick. The different modes Todd is describing look awesome- mirroring the TM to hunt with your foot, locking and using the foot pad for the pole, using the pole to sweep while you're using the TM for moving around. All really slick. Totally integrated and done in a smart way. I'm a HBird guy but that would make me swap if I was setting up a new boat.

This is great. One of the big reasons I never pulled the trigger on the Mega360 was having to have 2 different brand units on my boat.