You are smart to want a larger screen. That's important when out on the water and trying to use the GPS to find a fishing spot.

I love my Garmin eTrex Vista but it's screen size is too small. Add a cover over the screen and it's even harder to see stuff on the screen.

Have you heard of our used EASY GPS software? I have heard some good things about this software. I have downloaded it but not used it yet.

If you fish Kentucky Lake and are after crappie and have the Hydrografx Side scan CD of the area you fish then you are ten steps ahead of many others. If you calibrate your hydrografx map you can then use it on your computer screen to get the map coordinates of good looking fishing spots.

Look for OUTSIDE BENDS in the old River Channel or the old creeks where they enter the old river channel. I ordered, received and watched the In-Fisherman VCR and DVDs on crappie fishing. One of them was talking about crappie liking the OUTSIDE BEND. I think that those guys are pretty smart guys when it comes to fishing and I pay attention to what they say.

I know one guy that made a laptop computer protection system out of plastic lexan. He was taking his laptop on out West Sandy and mapping the area's brush piles using the KY Hydrografx mapping software.

Once you get the map coordinates from a good spot you can manually add them into your gps unit. They use the gps unit when on the lake to take you to that way point. That's where the Easy GPS program comes in handy. I think you can use it to load the gps way points into gps units from your pc.

Make sure that you calibrate your Hydrografx maps in the Software that comes with the CD. I would recommend that you register that software so that you can do a 9 point calibration on the map data. That will increase the longitude and latitude data.

One thing to remember when using KY Hydrografx mapping data. The data was acquired with a gps unit that's only accurate to + or - 3 METERS or + or - 10ft. While the depth data is very accurate and accurate to within 6" the longitude and latitude data can be 10 ft off 95% of the time and more than that 5% of the time on average.

So if you are looking for a individual stump on the bottom of a drop off you may have to throw out a marker buoy and do a circle around the buoy until you can locate the stump on your depth finder. It helps to have a wide angle transducer cone when doing this search. A transducer system that uses a dual frequency setting will help you pinpoint that stump faster. One that can cover 60 deg cone angle on one setting and 20 deg cone angle on another setting. Better still would be to use the new humminbird 987Si unit that can pinpoint that stump using side scanning sonar data and GPS data. But still your GPS data is only accurate to plus or minus 10ft 95% of the time. Humminbird also makes the Matrix 47D which is a 3d screen that can also show you the layout of the bottom where your boat just passed. And there is a newer Humminbird side scanning unit that's in the 700 series. Have not seen too much info on that unit.



Regards,

Moose1am