I am shopping for a new, sonar/gps combo. I am currently interested in the Lowrance HDS units. I will primarily be fishing the San Juan Islands and would like the option to add radar in the future. Has anyone tried the insight mapping options that allow you to build your own charts? This option is what drew me to Lowrance in the first place. Is structure scan worth it? Are there any other brands/models that I should be considering? I have saved around $2K for this upgrade. Any advice is much appreciated.

K/247

My buddy has an LLS2( I think). He can look deep into my soul with that thing. That's why I no longer have a seat on his boat. Jokes aside, u ever looked into Furuno?

...or Garmin...?

Ditto on either Furuno or Garmin, I have a lowrance, our next unit will be one of these two. Bob R

IMO structure scan isn't worth it for the salt.

I had a HDS-5 and replaced it with a Raymarine A78. The A78 features a CHIRP mode which is similar to Structure Scan. For shallow uses, 10-200', I love it. Anything deeper than that and it isn't much use. Since I fish for salmon almost exclusively at depths less than 200', I use it a lot. My .02...

I would put some research into the ducer. nothing wrong with what comes in the box but AirMar has a bunch of surprises for people that do research. I use a Furuno FCV 585 but the unit itself is only half the system I love to look at.

I also separated fish and chart. I had a garmin chartplotter/fishfinder for 12 years and it just recently failed electronically. It was a combo fish/chart unit and I had it wired to a switcher that allowed me to share the ducer for both the funruno or garmin sounders, in case something happened to the Furuno on a trip. The Furuno is so solid that I replaced the garmin with a chartplotter only unit.

2 cents.

Also...Garmin doesn't offer 3G or 4G radar technology for small boat applications. If they did Lowrance would be hurting bad.