Lowrance Elite 7 dsi gold review...Beware!

[moemoe]

I had done quite bit of researching this past winter for a new fishfinder plotter and basically narrowed done my search to a hds 7 or elite 7. I do a mixture of soft water fishing, but mostly lake ontario and gbay. Pixel count was  higher on the elite 7 than the hds, and rms output was the same, and both worked as chart plotter and could handle a gold chip, and both had broadband technology which would help on lake ontario. I did not plan on any additional add ons or networking, so i figured the elite 7 would cover all of my needs and the "gold" chip was a nice bonus. the positive first, Unit works great as a sonar, easy to use, but an "exit" button would be much nicer. I trolled lake ontario and was able to mark my cannon balls down to 175ft with the 50 degree cone. The chartplotter is a different story though, I uploaded the ''gold" chip to the unit and scrolled over lake ontario and was extremely dissappointed with the chart function on the navionics chart. Contour lines are marked in 40 to 50 feet sections, ie the niagara bar shows 4 contour lines going from 45 to 200ft,and there is very poor accuracy in the depth number listings as well. I assumed this was a mistake, so i brought back the unit to Fishing world, who were great in working with me to solve the problem. Ended up trying the actual navionics gold chip as opposed to the lowrance "gold" bundle and no difference in clarity of charts. Ended up calling both navionics and lowrance/navico and the problem is not in the chips, but in the software. The software for the units is not complete yet as per lowrance and therefore unable to fully read the chip. This was after uploading the new software update which will "now enable 1ft contour lines on navionics". Needless to say I am extremely dissappointed in this and feel that I have a useless navionics chip/function after sheeling out 850 bucks after tax.  Lowrance said they are trying to work on another software upgrade to solve the problem but no tentative release date. Great. My advice, stay away, until the bugs are sorted out.

 

[lineman49]

  You are 100% right . I have a elite 7 HDI  (the 4th one) and am still having problems with this one! One would think after spending $800-900 bucks the dam thing would work!!

[EarlyRiser]

Mine has certainly had a few hiccups so far, too. I do find that sometimes I have to go into the system settings under chart and select Lowrance instead of Navionics, let it load, then repeat and select Navionics to let everything reload and then the Navionics chip seems to be functioning properly after doing that reset...

[Justin B]

Not sure if it's the same or not but I have an elite 5 and where I bought it told me to keep the chart settings on the "lowrance" option all the time and my chart works pretty good

[BAZOOKAJOE]

My elite 5 dsi has been flawless. Although I probably only use about 20% of the features. I bought the "gold" version with Navionics chip. Chart plotter is fine. I did suffer with the learning curve to operate everything for a month or so. The manual is useless.