Ok so I thought I would get a Navionics card for my Lowrance hook 5. The silver card while affordable only covers to 10 meters which is pointless around here (Portland) as it would only give a few hundred meters from shore. The Gold card is out of my budget and the Platinum is ridiculous. I have the Navionics app on my phone but that's difficult to use with hands full of rods and slimy/bloody fish. My question is what alternatives are there? Is there a different/cheaper option or is there a way I can download onto an sd card or something? Any assistance would be appreciated.

Where are you sourcing the gold card mate? One dealer down here wanted 420 for the gold card. Bcf sold me one for about 150.

choppers wrote:Where are you sourcing the gold card mate? One dealer down here wanted 420 for the gold card. Bcf sold me one for about 150.

BCF currently have silver at $149.00 which is only a couple bucks cheaper than my local Can't find gold online at bcf my local wants over $500 for it

spider25160 wrote:My question is what alternatives are there?

There is an alternative (assuming the hook has the same import/export facilities as the elite Ti), which is that you create the data yourself. This is what I'm doing.

I was not satisfied with the detail of the navionics data for Werribee South, particularly for the shallower sections and the changes around the marina. I looked into my options and decided to just record the sidescan data on every trip I took and use that to generate new chart data.

The Lowrance software allows overlays to be imported and shown over the map data; this is pretty much what it's doing with navionics, but it's also possible to generate your own overlay files. There's a couple of ways of doing this but the easiest to me appeared to be with a program called 'ReefMaster'. It has a whole bunch of features that I won't go into now as most of them aren't really applicable but the one I want is the ability to import sets of sidescan data saved from the sonar and merge them into a sidescan mosaic. From that you can interactively explore the sidescan data (e.g. look at bottom composition etc) and more importantly generate a contour/isobath layer. This can then be exported in a number of formats (e.g. as a google earth/google maps .KMZ) or, more usefully, as an overlay for Lowrance plotters.

Lowrance supports a community that shares such scans, too, but I haven't spent much time looking into that. I just am working on building up my sidescan data on each trip until I get something useful enough. My progress is slow as the shallow depths i tend to fish in limits the range of the sidescan; if you fish in deeper water you'd get much more data (i.e. wider swathes).

I have yet to decide if i'll purchase reefmaster as it's expensive and has a few bugs, which I'm waiting for the author to fix (though on the plus side he's Australian and very responsive to bug reports). I'll show a few screenshots taken with Google Earth from a sample .KMZ I generated in the middle of last year (I didn't have a lot of sidescan data at the time so it's pretty bare).

In any event, I would recommend you consider turning on sonar logging every time you go out and save the data from time to time; it costs nothing other than a little bit of time and they may turn out to be useful.

I've found bcf dont always offer things online it's better to ring your local store . Also you could chech navionics web site.

Chris, the problem is it is those areas you are not familar with that you really need the charts. Areas that i know like the back of my hand i rarely use navionics.

laneends wrote:Chris, the problem is it is those areas you are not familar with that you really need the charts. Areas that i know like the back of my hand i rarely use navionics.

True, but you can always kick-start your chart collection by using public sidescan uploads for the area, where available.

http://ww2.lowrance.com/en-au/News/Free ... t-Genesis/
http://www.genesismaps.com/

My Navionics map card did a self destruct a few months ago while sitting in my laptop. Thankfully I pulled it out before the whole computer melted. Unfortunately no warranty claim as it was past Lowrance/Navionics warranty period (and I can't find the original receipt to do a ACL claim). I've looked for map cards on gumtree etc but the XL50 doesn't come up that often and can be as much as a new sounder. CH Smith were selling old Eilte 4 CHIRP head units with XL50 Gold for the price of a card for a while but seem to have run out of them. Imho I don't believe there's sufficient value in purchasing a new card directly from Navionics.

I've played around with recording my own tracks but the Elite 4 CHIRP keeps saying it's running out of storage space, even with an empty card. I've also looked into Insight Genesis community maps but these are still very limited for Australia and you can only load up one at a time, not in combination. I currently have the Bass Strait Community map loaded but it doesn't have much apart from strips either side of the heads and Flinders. I'd love to find a way of scanning/converting the Navionics webapp data onto a .kmz file or similar community base map, but I haven't found a way as yet.

I guess I'll just have hope I can win the Elite 5 tsi at the NSC.

shane wrote: I've played around with recording my own tracks but the Elite 4 CHIRP keeps saying it's running out of storage space, even with an empty card.

Are you sure you're telling it to use the external storage? It will default to internal otherwise. Also beware it will bitch every few hours if it reaches 4gb output size and you didn't have the option for managing file size turned on.

Shane wrote:I've also looked into Insight Genesis community maps but these are still very limited for Australia and you can only load up one at a time, not in combination. I currently have the Bass Strait Community map loaded but it doesn't have much apart from strips either side of the heads and Flinders. I'd love to find a way of scanning/converting the Navionics webapp data onto a .kmz file or similar community base map, but I haven't found a way as yet.

I may have a look at It at some point. If it's a software issue it may be solvable.

Either that, or we grab a friend with a stinker, add the sounder and start running grids in areas we are interested in to build our own set of maps

chrisw wrote: There is an alternative

Wow I'm afraid that all falls well outside my skill set although I can see how interesting it would be to work on my computing skills are pretty basic.
Is anyone using C-Map? How does it compare with Navionics?