Hey, you were telling me the other day that you were interested in a 334, but you never asked me if I knew anything about them. I’ve never used a 334, but I’ve been using my grandpa’s, nearly identical, 339 for a few years.

I wish that I could say that it is a great unit, but I can’t. If I was to describe it in one word, it would be “buggy.” From day one that unit has had software issues. The biggest problem is a bug in it that causes it to lose position all the time, even though it claims to be receiving a signal from 7-10 different satellites, which should give it accuracy within 3 meters. When it does this, I simply restart it and it works fine again for a little while.

The second software issue that it has is that sometimes it won’t let me access the second menu. If you haven’t used a Lowrance, you press the menu button once and a menu page pops up, press it again and the second of the two menu pages pops up. What happens sometimes is I press the button and the first menu pops up, but when I press it again it just disappears instead of the second menu popping up. The way to temporarily fix this is to do a “soft reset.” You hold a combination of buttons and the unit restores all defaults, but keeps waypoints. You can also do a "hard reset" that wipes out everything.

On top of the software issues, it also has a couple of mechanical issues. One nearly harmless one is that the lights that illuminate the buttons are burning out one by one. The other, not so harmless, issue that just started this past year is that the unit turns its self on all the time. I would turn it off at the launch and go out in the garage a couple days later and hear the transducer clicking. Now I just unplug the unit when I leave the launch. No big deal, but still a pain in the butt.

I wish that I could say good things like most other people do, because I’m sure Lowrance makes good fish finders. I’m sure that my grandpa simply got a bad unit, and that this kind of stuff is not typical.