Lowrance Products

[Buzzbait]

Recently was very happy with the arrival of my new Lowrance Carbon and Autopilot w/remote. Installation was straight forward though instructions are poor.

After several days of phone calls and many, many hours, unit still will not operate properly. The first line tech support is strictly for extremely easy problems.

Any significant problems are passed off to senior tech support and all of these people were very knowledgeable and helpful to a point... They are willing to email

procedures on start up and commissioning (which should be included with product) but will not wait for you to complete the set up, Even though I have waited for them 20-30 minutes

for them to be available. Two of the problems were 2 significant updates that where never loaded but unit was sent out. Leaving me to download, unzip (the unzipping required another program to download)

After all that I got support that verified the updates were installed correctly, and again he was done. Unit still not operating and still waiting for my last call to be answered.

I'm sure  few do work out of the box, but not this one.

Buyer Beware

 

[Gator]

We recently had a Gen2 Touch that I'd purchased on eBay go bad...I'm fairly sure I bought somebody else's problem. Anyway, Lowrance offered to replace it with a Gen 3 for $300. So, rather than scrap the unit entirely, I went ahead and paid for the upgrade. I was surprised when I got the new unit from Lowrance to find an HDS Carbon in the box. I'm not sure whether that was intentional and their pricing structure simply didn't reflect the newer Carbon units or whether I just got lucky. Either way, the installation and setup was easy, literally plug and play which amazed me, and the unit has performed flawlessly this summer. We don't have it coupled to an autopilot. However, it seems fairly simple to update the firmware. I'm sorry to hear that you got a dud.