Thank you man. I'll post up asap.

Well, finally got on the water. Units worked with no problems at all. I took a bunch of pics with the factory settings. I did not mess with anything other than range. Couple of things:

1. SideVu is equal to Humminbird's Onix unit (which I thought was the best in the market until now). The only thing is you can see out 600' with the Garmin. And that's bright and clear all the way out. I took some pics at 600' but didn't realize the SD card was locked. So I will try again next time.
2. DownVu is not as good as the Onix out of the box. I think if I mess with contrast I can get it to be about the same.
3. Waffle effect is pretty bad on the SideVu while running DownVu on the same frequency. If you run the DV on 800 it pretty much goes away.
4. 2D CHIRP is way way better than both the Onix and the Simrad in my opinion. Perfect arches and very good resolution.
5. Panoptix will freak you out. I have never seen anything like this before. You know when you watch fish in an aquarium they kind of move around some, then stop, then move around again? That's what you see on Panoptix. There is a learning curve but it's not bad. After 30 minutes I was picking out trees from other structure. I took a pic of my lure and you can see the braid line also. You can also see fish messing with bait balls and the bait moving away quickly.
6. I think for my type of fishing Panoptix down will get more use. Forward is pretty weird sometimes. Even if you are on a flat bottom, it looks like the bottom is sloping up. Again, first time out.
7. I watched a big fish follow my lure really close and when I looked down close to the boat it was a huge gar. It was just following the lure trying to decide what to do. Was able to see it with the forward panoptix first.







The blue dots are moving bait.



This is crosstalk between the front and down Panoptix. They run the same frequency.



This is a stump on the forward panoptix.



Trees



Another tree



This is a RSR Lures 50/50 minnow with braided line.

Fish!!

Great write up, thanks Diel11.

How are the lake maps?

Only been to Lewisville and Tawakoni so far and both were equal or better than Navionics. I run Navionics on the Simrad unit so I can compare head to head.

Console unit is having problems. Keeps shutting down by itself. The unit has an "event log" feature where it keeps track of any warning, problem or message, so I looked in there and it has an entry. I have emailed Garmin but will also call tomorrow to see what they say.

Per Garmin engineers the unit is overheating. I sent it back today and should have a replacement early next week.

One thing I learned about the unit. If you have a SD card in one of the slots, every time the unit boots up it will save a XML file that you can email the engineers. They can see what the unit is doing. So on top of the event log, these units have a bunch of ways to keep track of everything that is going on.

So far Garmin customer service is as good as Humminbird.

Curious to know if you have switched to the Motorguide Xi5? If so, I'd like your opinion of it's 'anchor' mode or whatever they call it.
I'm considering making the change to Garmin myself and your reports are helping me make that decision!

I have the Xi5 and the Ulterra. The Xi5 anchor is much better in my opinion. Not a lot of swinging and back/forth movement, just finds the spot and stays there. Only downfall of the Xi5 is top speed. It's about .5mph slower than the 112 Ulterra (Xi5 is 105). But so far everything else works well. The perfect motor would be a Xi5 with self deploy/stow.