By Jason Christie
On my tournament boat, I have a Garmin GPSMAP® 7600s. But I also have a little flat-bottom boat I fish off for fun, and on it I have Garmin echoMAP™ combos. And they give me the same quality of screen images as my GPSMAP combos. The best thing about my echoMAP combos, besides their price, is that they’re so simple to use and install. I installed my echoMAP units myself. It was literally hook up the transducer, run a connecting wire to the other combo unit and done. And I can take the mapping card out of my GPSMAP 7600 and stick it in my echoMAP, and get the exact same mapping.
The setup on my little boat is pretty much like my tourney boat except with echoMAP combos. On the console, I have an echoMAP 93sv, and I split the screen between traditional CHIRP sonar and ClearVü or SideVü scanning sonar, depending on what I’m looking for, but I always have the map up there. Now if I want to cover a lot of water, I use SideVü, because it lets me cover hundreds of feet at a time. If I’m looking around under my boat, that’s ClearVü, of course. If I’m actually looking for fish of different sizes and such, I’ll use CHIRP traditional, which gives me a more proportional picture. Up on the front unit, by the trolling motor, I split half mapping and half CHIRP traditional. I always want to know where I am on the map, and I want to see the closest fishy-looking feature, a ledge or something and what’s underneath me. I don’t have Panoptix™ on my little boat yet, but I definitely will someday. It’ll work with my echoMAP units. And that’ll give you pretty much the same features as my tourney boat.
