Lowrance Elite 7 HDI

[tennvols00]

Just bought the Lowrance Elite 7 HDI. Wanted to see if anyone on here had any experience with this unit. Looking forward to my first ever unit for my boat! Any feedback or advice on set up is appreciated! Thanks in advance

[spottedbass]

I would like to hear comments too. I have been back and forth on buying one. If you have one, do you use the chart plotter? The Elite 7X is cheaper and I can't decide if I would use the chart plotter or not.

[spottedbass]

I just purchased one from Cabelas. They have them on sale for $599 with transducer. Lowrance has a $100 mail-in rebate on them to right now. It is suppose to be here around April 18th.

[XxthejuicexX]

I have one, and my fishing partner has two of them on his boat. I love it. I think the sonar returns are better than on a humminbird unit. I use my chart for mapping locations to fish. My buddy uses his to run with to stay in the channels. I will say that sometimes the GPS will annoy you because it does not adjust very quickly. You will sometimes have to drive in a straight line quickly to get the unit to change you boat direction on your map.Here are a few pictures from the unit.

[tennvols00]

I know that this will help locate fish but would you say it has dramatically increased your catching of fish? Do you use the down scan more or less than the sonar?

[XxthejuicexX]

It has helped me Catch more fish. During the winter it allowed me to pinpoint deeper structure and locate Crappie. During the hot days of summer I can find schools of bass deep. I was able to know exactly where my bait was depth wise by using the sonar so I could keep it right out of the trees/brush this winter and catch more crappie. It helps locate active bass feeding during the hotter months, they look like fireworks shooting across the screen. The DI comes in handy when you are not sure what you are looking at. Like the pics I posted of the tree, you might think that those could be fish stacked up because they look like arches but if you switch to DI there is no question it's a tree. The DI is just there to supplement the traditional sonar, I use 2D sonar for everything.

[tennvols00]

How do you distinguish between crappie and bass or catfish? Thanks for the info. Really informative!

[XxthejuicexX]

By the way the fish stack up or orientate to the bottom. Bass don't usually stack up in the water column they will be parallel with the bottom. Sometimes on Guntersville in the summer you can almost get a false bottom because there will be so many Bass schooled up. Crappie will ball up more plus they do not have as large as of return on the sonar. I have not caught any catfish but I would assume that they will be sitting closer to the bottom also.

[Reel Tune]

Thanks for the picture juice.

[tennvols00]

Thanks again for the information! I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival and practice time!

[tennvols00]

Well I had the maiden voyage with the Elite 7 HDI. Took some photos with my camera as I am not sure yet how to capture a shot within the finder itself. I feel like I am a pretty techie person but this unit has me overwhelmed. Let me know what you guys think of the pictures. The fish seem to look more like globs than arches. It is mounted on the transom and I tried my best to put it in the exact location of the X-4 that came with my Lowe boat. I messed with the settings a ton and I feel like I did so much that I may need to just go back to factory reset settings! If anyone would post their settings I would great;y appreciate it. Any and all details you will give would work. I was at Laurel Hill lake for two hours just boating around and the GPS never pulled up anything other than an orange background. I didn't figure my Navionics Gold chip would have info for that lake but I guess I at least figured it would show a blue body of water?

[XxthejuicexX]

Looking at those pictures, the first one to me shows fish, most of them out at the far edge of the transducer beam but with some under it. As far as the GPS not finding you, did it ever pop up a message saying that your location was ever found? As far as setting I have mine on 83kHz and I think surface clarity low and Noise reduction on medium. My fishing partner runs his on 200 with noise on low and surface clarity off he says that he thinks you spot fish closer to the surface that way, I don't like all the clutter on the screen. I am not looking for fish 3' down with my sonar.

[nomad60]

Check out the settings here: http://www.bbcboards.net/lowrance-ga...about-dsi.html

Those are the settings I am using for my Elite 7x and they are a great starting point, you can fine tune from there.

[spottedbass]

I had mine on the water for the first time yesterday. I love it. I went to some areas where I knew there were rock piles just so I could see them on the DSI. It was great. Then I when to another spot where I thought there was some brush. I had to move around a little then BINGO!! A tree or a brush pile with limbs sticking up. I used the backtrack feature and set a waypoint on it. I then drifted away and used the chartplotter to navigate back to it. It got me close but I still had to search for the tree. Does anyone have any tips about marking waypoints like this?

I also used the settings from the link below as a starting point. I still wish it was marking fish better. Maybe I just wasn't on any fish to mark. I still need to tweak it some. I was able to drop a jig down next to the trolling motor and see it on the sonar. That was cool.

So far so good.

[Reel Tune]

Well you guys talked me into it. I ordered an Elite 7 CHIRP yesterday. I was going to go with the HDS, but didn't want to have to bother with the Structure Scan module.