Garmin ECHOMAP or STRIKER for beginners Pt 1 (How to Choose?)

foreign hey how's it going out there I'd like to welcome you to part one of this series on Garmin Eco map fish finders and chart plotters and so let's get right into it so let's start talking about acronyms and when we talk about acronyms let's start with the transducers okay so it's important to know if you buy your chart plotter fish finder separate from your transducer they come in two different types they come in a four pin and an eight pin now if you're using an existing transducer and just buying a chart plotter or if you want to buy the transducer separate try to make sure that you get the right one but if you don't don't worry about it too much they do make adapters so when you're looking at the transducer you'll see some of them may have a TM on the end of it TM stands for Trans amount which means it's going to be mounted on the back of your boat near the main motor and you may have some that are th th stands for through-hole some models you drill through the bottom of the hole and some models you glue in to the inside of your boat you glue it and it shoots actually through the hole and some you can put a container and fill it with like glycol or some kind of liquid and again it shoots through the hole of the boat so that's th if you get a transducer that says if stands for ice fishing and Garmin has a bunch of different bundles for ice fishings so if you see that if that's just for ice fishing now other acronyms on the transducer are HW which stands for high wide chirp and M which stands for mid-chirp and the difference between those two is the high wide is more for shallow water Anglers while the M for Mid is more for your deep water Anglers so that's kind of the difference between those two and when you're looking at the specifications on the transducer you'll see a wrms what that stands for is the Watts or the power that the transducer can put out and that means a lot because on a gt54 transducer for example it's 350 Watts where gt56 transducers 500 watts and that means that you're going to have a stronger signal going out in the water where you're going to be able to reach down deeper while you're fishing so let's talk about the different sonar types so there's two types of traditional there's the regular traditional which has been around for years and it's just got a certain frequencies and then you've got traditional chirp now traditional chirp sends out different signals or different frequencies all at the same time to give you better definition and give you a more accurate representation of what's down below the boat now all of the units fish finders tarp plotters all of them across the board are going to have traditional so you don't have to worry too much about that there's not an acronym for that but when you see a CV beside it what that means is it's clear view only and Clearview is a down Imaging of the bottom of the surface so if you were looking straight down at it that's what Clearview is and that gives you that image that almost looks like a photograph now if you have a unit that has SV behind it SB stands for side view and side view what it is is you're looking at both sides of the boat at a distance that you can determine whether you want to look 50 foot out both sides or 60 foot or 70 foot and and you can go quite a ways out now don't worry you don't have to pick between side view and clear view if you get a unit that that has CV it means you're going to get traditional and Clear View if you pick a unit that has SV you're going to get traditional Clearview and side view and other transducers have what's called UHD and UHD stands for ultra high definition which is the latest technology that Garmin has foreign okay so let's talk quickly about the difference between a fish finder and a chart plotter so a fish finder basically they all have GPS all of them you can set your waypoints but a fish finder doesn't actually have contour maps pre-loaded on it and you can't buy contour maps form they don't have an SD card slot so you can't stick a Maps card in there you know if your buddy says hey if you get that we'll use my maps I've got a map card it won't work in regular fish finder which is the striker series now chart plotter is basically just what it just what it says it's more for navigation it has the maps on it it does just as good or a better job in some cases like the UHD models of actually locating fish and seeing structure on the bottom but it has the contour maps and it's got a lot of different functions that you can do like Auto guidance and different things like that different controls so a chart plotter is an advance over a fish finder so there's a couple of these units that you need to be careful when you're selecting them because it's a little bit misleading on the Garmin Striker as you can see here they're calling out that it doesn't actually have the chirp so it misleads you a little bit in the transducer that comes with the unit the unit is capable of chirp but the transducer it's bundled with is not so if you want chirp in a four inch Striker you can either go to the Vivid series or you got to buy a different type of transducer personally I'd probably just go with the Vivid series the new unit the Garmin came out with in 2022 which is an echomap uhd2 is a little misleading as well because it does label it as a UHD which the chartplotter itself will read a UHD transducer but the bundle doesn't come with the UHD transducer or at the time I was filming this video it didn't so basically you could buy one without a transducer and then buy an HD transducer to go with it or go ahead and buy the unit if the sale is good enough and then you could buy an HD transducer later so read the description on those two before you buy them because they are a little bit misleading all right so first up on the lineup is just a regular Striker and again at the time of filming this video they only have one and that's the little four inch and I'm going to tell you something guys for a hundred and twenty dollars it is hard to beat that fish finder if you don't have anything right now and you're you know wow I don't know if I want to spend say 600 to 2 000 on a fish finder a chart plotter if you just want to locate fish and just get started with a fish finder it's 120 bucks and I'm going to tell you what the picture will blow you away on this little Striker unit and it also the transducer comes with that thing will shoot way down there it'll I forget exactly what the range is off top of my head but that little Striker four inch is not a bad investment if you don't have anything right now and the beauty of it is if you purchase that four inch Striker and then you decide later wow I really like fish finders um you know you can always use that as a second fish finder on your boat now a few years back Garmin came out with the striker Vivid Series in the Vivid Series has seven different color palettes so it's really nice it's got a great screen again when you're in there buying it when you're in Cabela's Shields or Bass Pro Shops take a look at it where they got it on simulator mode they they really are a good picture now the simulator mode will spoil you because it looks just like a picture normally it's not that good on the water but anyway take a look at it it's great got all those different color palettes to choose from now the striker Vivid like I mentioned it comes in four inch but it comes in a five inch seven inch and nine inch as well now the four inch and five inch models they are clear view only CV which means you get clear view and traditional they're not capable of side view and to be honest with you the side view on that smaller screen you're not going to see a whole lot anyway now the seven inch is kind of the Swing model a seven inch you can get in Clear View and you can get inside view where you have all three sonars now I've got a seven inch with side view and I wouldn't recommend it if you're going to be you know a few feet away from your screen because it's hard to see that side view so I don't know if the side view is worth it unless you got it right up on your console or you're in a kayak where you have it real close or something like that now when you step up to the nine inch Striker Vivid you get side view which means you get all three sonars you get seven color palettes and that unit is plenty effective with side view you know you can you can see it on a nine inch screen real well so anyway that's the fish finders okay so let's talk about chart plotters now and we'll start out with GS Maps now I'm just going to touch on GS Maps and give you kind of an overview the GS map really is set up for larger vessels Cruisers Sailors sailboat Racers things like that people who are really serious about navigation it has a full array of network capabilities it has all of your sonars it has all your maps you can also do open array radar and they have autopilot capabilities and that's based on the size of the vessel you can go from point A to point B and it'll route you through a safe route especially if you're in a sailboat or something like that with a with a keel you know you got to stay in a certain depth of water so it'll take care of that for you they also have digital switching capabilities so if you need to turn your coffee pot on you can do it with a digital switch on your chart plotter so just kidding that's more for lighting and things like that it links up your radio through Fusion link if you have Fusion link radio it gets all the weather data and of course your VHF and AIS so it's fully capable for ocean going vessels is what a GS map is for although it is plenty capable for just bass boat if you wanted to get one but anyway uh we'll talk about the echo Maps now all right well let's go ahead and start out with the top of the line Eco map Ultra the ultra comes in a 10 inch screen and a 12 inch screen and of course different prices depending on what screen size is now what you get with an ultra is you get a higher pixel count on the screen for a little clearer image and a little more definition and you get a higher speed processor and sometimes I've noticed on my uh my regular UHD units that it'll get a little glitchy with the maps so you get a little faster processor and it and it also comes with both Maps it comes with the Lakeview map and the G3 blue chart maps so you get your inland waterways and 42 000 different lakes so you get the full array of maps with the ecomap ultra now the ultra does have some Advanced navigation features that aren't on the regular UHD unit but I don't see that as a uh is a deal breaker by any means but there are a few differences in the navigation now one of the big ones for me and one of the reasons that I bought the ultra was you get an additional card slot you get two card slots and you get two ethernet networking connections so for me that was kind of a big deal because if I want to put a map card in I can still have my active captain card in and I don't have to do a lot of switching around or anything like that and the second Network Port you could actually Network Three chart plotters together and there's other equipment you can Network as well one other feature you get with the ecomap ultra is you get another Port where you can directly plug in an lvs-12 panoptix transducer now that's not the full capable live scope you know the newest latest and greatest but just the panoptix lvs-12 you could go ahead and get that transducer and you can just plug that directly into that chart plotter so that would that could be really convenient now the regular UHD or ecomap UHD series it's designed for an angler and they come with up to a nine inch screen so they've got again the four inch five inch seven inch and nine inch screens and again take a look at the CV and the SV because not all the units come with the side view some of them only come with the Clear View now one of the features of both the ultra and the UHD models if you buy a Garmin Force trolling motor you can control that trolling motor with your chart plotter now the Garmin force is the only trolling motor you can control it will not network with a Minn Kota that's hummingbird only now the other thing the ultra and the UHD come with they come with UHD transducers in the bundle and that's pretty much what you would connect up to those and there's different versions of them and I go I go over that in some of my other videos and the UHD technology is really really good it's it's like taking a picture underwater it's you can really dial it in especially on a hard bottom but UHD has its limitations as well it's for shallow and mid-depth water now when you get out into deep water you're going to be locked in pretty much to just traditional and take a look at the transducer and see what the maximum depths are if you're somebody who goes offshore all the time and you're fishing in a thousand foot of water likely it's not going to do you a lot of good to have a UHD unit and I know from personal experience the clear view in the side view and up to 100 foot of water works really good so let's talk about networking for a minute the way Garmin has it structured is they're in series you've got a GS map series you've got an ecomap series you've got a striker series and then you've got a uhd2 so those different series of chart plotters and fish finders will only communicate with the units in their series which means if you have a GS map it's only going to communicate with others in the gsmap series now in the Eco map it gets a little bit fuzzy because the ecomap ultra and the ecomap UHD they will communicate together and they communicate fine that's what I run I've got a 106 on my console and I've got a 93 svuhd on my bow and they communicate just fine and one's an ultra and one's the UHD so that's not a problem there but you cannot communicate with a fish finder with a striker which is what I originally tried to do I had a striker series and I upgraded to an Eco map I didn't do my research I just assumed I would be able to communicate with both of them through some sort of a network and it didn't work out that way so I ended up buying another Eco map and then another Eco map yeah I got an ecomap problem anyway uh be aware of that when you go to make your purchase decision that if you know you're eventually going to want two units go ahead and get them in the same series now the uhd2 is a little different in that it doesn't have a hardwired network it networks via the Wi-Fi so that's a little bit different on that new uhd2 but you can't Network a uhd2 with a regular ecomap UHD or Ultra it won't work I checked was Garmin on that now on the striker series even though they don't have ethernet ports they have two extra wires in the power cord that you can connect together and they'll actually talk to each other and a network is important for a lot of different reasons but for me the main function is if I'm at one chart plotter or fish finder and I Mark a waypoint and then I jump up on the bow or vice versa I want to be able to see that Waypoint on the other unit so that's mainly what I use the networking for but there's there's an array of things and it makes it easier when you go to update your units if they're networked together foreign foreign so let's talk about the actual numbers so whether you're buying a striker an Eco map Ultra an ecomap UHD or a uhd2 the first number is going to be the screen size so if you're buying a 93 SV you're buying a chart plotter with a nine inch screen now same thing with the ultra if you're buying a 106 you're buying a 10 inch screen if you buy a one two six you're buying a 12 inch screen so that first number is a designator of the screen size the second number is where it gets a little complex and we'll go ahead and start out with an ecomap UHD series now again the striker series doesn't have Maps so you don't have to worry about it on the striker series so an ecomap UHD unit two indicates a worldwide base map which is just a general map it's not going to have Contours or details of where fueling stations are or anything like that so A 3 is going to be U.S Lakeview maps and that's going to have all your Lake Contours and points of interest on it a 4 is a blue chart and that's your Coastal waterways and again all the points of interest in the United States and a five is Canada Lake View with all the Contours and points of interest now that's on an Eco map UHD here's one of the separations between an Eco map UHD and an Eco map Ultra is the ultra two means you get the worldwide base map just like with the Eco map but a six indicates that you get United States Lakeview and blue chart maps together and the Bahamas Garmin is really proud they got some new maps of the Bahamas that they're really proud of so you get Lakeview blue chart and the Bahamas with an ultra and that designator again is a six at the end so 106 would be a 10 inch screen with Lake View and blue chart on it a 102 would be a 10 inch screen with just worldwide base map all right so as I mentioned this is part one of a series of videos that I'm doing so go ahead and take a look at this video next and until next time keep calm and hook them

Channel: Double T Fishing Texas

Views: 56,611

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Id: vtqKQkNlzu0

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 23 2022