Simrad or garmin
for lakes? Our lakes near us have trees.
channels are typical lake, but small changes in depth , present new hidden tree tops
I have Had garmin stuff forever..in bus, and my old boat, but tech has changed so fast.
simrad seems pretty good, isn't it only tied to cell or GPS and no real time what's below?
Want real time what's under me in contours and depth
And reported.. Trees

Funny thing guy at one electronic store swears by lowrance, next place its all garmin

Thanks

all I can say is go and play with them all. I have Simrad on one boat and Raymarine on the other.... they are night and day different on how they operate.... (think iphone and android) the Raymarine is so simple to use!

I agree with the comparison that Garmin is to iPhone to what Simrad is to Android. For lake boating, I think Garmin is fine, but the chart detail is only as good as the cartography chip you use in it. I have NEVER seen decent lake cartography that is anywhere near as detailed as ocean carts

If you are looking for real time under water sounding detail then you need an Echo Sounder that sends data to your MFD. I am using a Simrad MFD, Echo, and Radar and the integration if very good but almost too many things to fiddle with. Again, this is where Garmin condenses things better.

I've had four Simrad GO9 MFD's now, two in my last boat and two in my newly acquired boat. They both came with them. I like Navionics charts and particularly the Dock to Dock routing feature. Simrad says they're compatible, but the Dock to Dock will route you across land every time. It works just fine on my phone app. When I called Simrad, their response was that there was nothing they could do as it wasn't under their control. Then, on my current boat, I noticed that an update was available, so I installed it. The Simrad lost all communication with the Mercury outboards. Since there are no analog gauges, this was kind of a big deal. It took me two days of pestering them via phone to have them finally tell me to upgrade the software on my Mercury VesselView Link which corrected the issue. The Simrad update was from 2022. They should have been well aware of this incompatibility and even warned you in advance. Moving forward, I would probably choose Garmin as they own Navionics.

I found both of those to suck at navigation.

I really like the Raymarine... "build a route" is pretty awesome

If you’re after real-time views of what’s under you especially for spotting submerged trees, Garmin’s Livescope is tough to beat. It gives live sonar and great detail in shallow, tree-filled lakes. Simrad is solid, especially for saltwater and structure scan, but their real-time imaging isn’t as strong as Garmin’s.

Been watching the captians course guy on you tube
he uses garmin and navionics
ockechobee lake was very detailed both on his phone and the display
It looks like the app is almost real time chart updates..for things other than tide.
he is not sponsored by them
​​back.he delivers lots of boats all over and dors chartered gigs. And uses wide range of different systems
I bet 8 out of 10 he double checks the plot with his app
Amazing how so much has changed
I still have my roll up charts for Jacksonville FL
Its going on a wall.