Lowrance HDS-7 7-Inch Waterproof Marine GPS and Chartplotter with 50/200kHz transducer (Insight USA Maps)

Lowrance HDS-7 7-Inch Waterproof Marine GPS and Chartplotter with 50/200kHz transducer (Insight USA Maps) Review

Lowrance HDS-7 7-Inch Waterproof Marine GPS and Chartplotter with 50/200kHz transducer (Insight USA Maps) Feature

• Marine GPS chartplotter/fishfinder with full-color 6.4-inch SolarMAX Plus display
• High-sensitivity 16-channel GPS+WAAS antenna and integrated Broadband Sounder
• Built-in Insight USA map with highly detailed inland and coastal coverage
• Broadband Sounder technology displays underwater details with extreme clarity
• Supports Sirius satellite weather and radio; measures 8.8 x 6.4 x 3.5 inches (W x H x D)

Suitable as both a standalone unit or a multifunction display for an integrated navigation network, the Lowrance HDS-7 marine GPS chartplotter/fishfinder makes it easy to navigate unfamiliar waters and find the best fishing spots. The HDS-7 starts with a brilliant 6.4-inch SolarMAX Plus display. The sunlight-viewable, wide-angle, full-color VGA display offers a crisp 480 x 640 resolution, so you can enjoy picture-perfect clarity when viewing maps or checking out the undersea floor. The HDS-7 is also extremely precise whether you're navigating unfamiliar waters or scanning the underwater world. The navigator comes with a built-in, high-sensitivity 16-channel GPS antenna that delivers spot-on accuracy, along with an integrated Broadband Sounder.

The HDS-7's full-color, high-resolution VGA display is viewable even in direct sunlight (HDS-8 pictured).

Detailed Mapping
The HDS-7 offers exceptionally detailed electronic charting thanks to its built-in Insight USA map. Insight HD maps combine fantastic detail with exclusive Lowrance shaded relief, giving them the look and feel of 3D viewing so you can easily understand the submerged topography at a glance. With Insight HD maps, you can quickly find fish-holding areas, zoom in with exquisite detail, and easily avoid dangerous shallows.

The Insight USA map combines the inland and coastal areas of the Lake Insight and Nautic Insight HD maps. With Lake Insight information, the GPS offers exquisite fishing hot spots detail for more than 500 popular lakes--including the Great Lakes--plus some coastal coverage. The detail ranges from marked fishing areas to helpful fishery and facilities information. Other lakes are covered, too: Lake Insight provides enhanced shoreline detail and depth contours for more than 5,000 U.S. lakes and identifies more than 100,000 bodies of water. The Nautic Insight information pairs a superior view of coastal bottom structures with detailed coastal and offshore depth contours, in addition to nav aids, for the entire U.S. coastline.

The unit's Broadband Sounder offers incredible display clarity to help distinguish between fish and other targets.

Users can take their charting to the next level with other Insight HD maps and Navionics chart cards (sold separately), which fit inside the HDS-5's high-speed SD card slot. Navionics cards, for example, open up access to the world's largest "seamless" marine electronic chart database, with cards for diverse regions throughout the world. Many of the cards come fully loaded with a wealth of fishing guidance detail, including expert fishing tips and techniques, and include ample memory space to record HDS sonar logs, screenshots, waypoints/routes/trails, and system settings without the need for an additional SD memory card. Within the maps, users can store up to 5,000 waypoints and 200 routes, in addition to plotting up to 10 trails with 12,000 points per trail.

Broadband Sounder Technology
Each HDS unit includes Lowrance's award-winning Broadband Sounder digital technology. As the vital link between the transducer and your HDS display, Broadband is proven to find more fish with greater sensitivity, higher definition, and more display clarity than ever before. With Lowrance's Broadband digital signal processing software, noise goes way down and sensitivity goes way up. The result: Ultimate target discrimination, helping the transducer separate fish from other underwater targets in all cover, in thermoclines, and in all water conditions.

The unit's advanced digital filtering also vastly improves at-a-glance display clarity while sharpening bottom images. By painting a much cleaner picture of targets, you see features that other fishfinders will show poorly or miss completely. To cover even more water, Broadband automatically adds 83 kHz operation to a 200 kHz single-frequency transducer. At 83 kHz, you receive a full 120 degrees of wide-angle coverage.

And Broadband sounding offers incredible deep-water performance. Even at high boat speeds, Broadband keeps a bottom lock at depth, with exceptional targeting of fish arches on the bottom, around wrecks, and within other seabed structures. When used with a high-power transducer, the strong bottom locks and water column detail reach down thousands of feet.

Other features include a pure-white LED screen/keypad backlighting that fully adjusts to zero dim for night vision; support for Sirius satellite weather and stereo-quality radio; and networking options for Ethernetworks and NMEA 2000. The HDS-7 carries a manufacturer's two-year limited warranty.

The HDS-7 offers incredibly detailed mapping of inland and coastal areas.

Specifications

• Display size: 6.4 inches
• Display resolution: 480 x 640
• Display type: 16-bit color full VGA SolarMAX Plus TFT
• Backlighting: Screen/keypad
• Backlighting type: Pure white LED
• Sonar and GPS overlay data: Yes
• Split-screen presentation: Yes
• Multi-language display: Yes, 23 languages
• Sonar frequency: 50/200 or 83/200 kHz
• Transducer type: Choice of dual-frequency Skimmer
• Sonar output power: Max 250-watt peak-to-peak actual; 30,000-watt peak-to-peak analog equivalent
• Fishfinder features: Colorline/Grayline, ASP, FishSymbol ID, FishTrack, FlashGraf, FasTrack, and Ping Speed HyperScroll
• Depth alarm: Yes
• Temperature display: Yes
• GPS antenna type: Internal high-sensitivity GPS+WAAS
• Receiver channels: 16
• Background map: Insight USA maps
• Waypoint storage: 5,000
• Routes: 200
• Plot trails: Up to 10 trails, up to 12,000 points per trail
• Man overboard feature: Yes
• GPS alarms: Yes
• Networking connectors: NMEA 2000, NMEA 0183, and Ethernet
• Built-in backup memory: Yes
• Casing: Sealed and waterproof
• Memory card: Single SD/MMC/MMC+ memory card slot
• Dimensions: 8.8 by 6.4 by 3.5 inches (W x H x D)

Lowrance HDS-7. 7-Inch screen chart plotter fish finder with built-in Insight USA maps. Includes a 50/200kHz transom mount depth and temperature transducer.