Hand held GPS

[chunk]

Anybody have any suggestions on a hand held GPS with lake maps?

[dfkiii]

Although it isn't a dedicated handheld GPS, I've been using the Navionics app on my iPhone with success. For my needs, it works pretty good.

[Paul Schueller]

I am a fan of Garmin eTrex units. I have had a Legend and a Vista, both were great. Good maps can be downloaded for free from gpsfiledepot.com. I am not sure if good lake maps are available or not.

[deantre]

I have a lowrance expedition color and put in the lakemaster map chip. All the info is there but it was very hard to read, went ahead and got a gps/depthfinder one of the lowrance lms units, after two seasons have just got the HD8 lowrance will put the lms unit on the bow. The hand held is just not a very efficient way to cover water, takes too much time to study it. Will work in a pinch but it will cost you lure time in the water. Dean

[Ty Sennett]

If you plan on using it on the water the handheld is going to frustrate you. If you plan on using it for fun or studying the lake at home it's great. You basically have to hold the handheld right in front of your face to see the lake while driving. It does work like others said in a pinch.

[ChipVet]

I have a garmin unit and tried it for fishing and hated it. Spend 30 % of your time not fishing; I use a lowrance color depth gps unit and it is a the best thing I own. You can go right to the spots with no problem; one year the fog rolled in on the part of the lake I was on and I just went to my icon for a deep hump. I think I caught a fish on the second cast; I would never been there if not for the unit. They a spendy but a 7 or 8 inch unit will work great and much less than the big unit. The handheld works good for hunting locating your spot or your car when dark or marking a spot for ice fishing.

I have a question on the chip as I do not have mine backed up and would hate to spend all the to re-create the icons. I have a lake maps and am having trouble figuring out how to back it up; I think you need a card reader but not sure or which one. Any help on this would be appreciated, thanks.

[deantre]

The waypoints are independent of your map chip. What you do is take out the map chip and put in a blank formated sd chip and back the waypoints to that. Remove it and put it in a safe place and replace your map chip. Your waypoints will still be there but if your system gets stolen or goes belly up you will still have your waypoints on the SD chip you saved them to. Your owners manual can give the specifics on which menu to use but it is easy and does not take very long. Dean

[ChipVet]

If I understand this correctly I will have the way points but not the map on the backup????? If so can I get both???

[Mark Benson]

ChipVet:

Dean led you down the right path. To your question, I am only guessing, the only way to get your map backed up may be to repurchase... I am sure the more computer literate guys might be able to help you download the map, but I am betting that Lowrance or Navionics have done some type of encryption to keep you from doing so.

A neat tip I got from Rob Manthei is to purchase an extra power cord that you can attach to another 12V battery (I use an old motorcycle battery from my Vexilar), so that you can take you whole graph inside where its warm in the winter to do this play. If you are like I was, I pretty much had used all of my memory when I chose to do this... So I spent many a night a couple of winters ago working on this... I set up my SD card with a whole enchilada (almost a 1000 waypoints and trails) saved as a file. Then I worked up other files of certain lake chains and lakes so I up load them when I fished them and would be able to maintain data specific to each body(s) of water. It can be a little bit frustrating at times having to take the 5 or so minutes of time at the landing to save the file currently on the graph and up load the lake you are going to fish, but it has been a great space saver. I can then download fishing spots from my handheld to my graph for storage and take my graph with, power it up without the puck and can use it to transfer saved waypoints for ice fishing.

I am considering the purchase of another SD card to backup my current SD card as I have been using the current one now for two or three years.

Mark