I put a post up a while back about the new Helix fish finders. I'm in no hurry but I was almost settled on the Helix 9 SI which is right at my $1k budget. Now Lowrance has the Elite 7 Ti for $800 with structure scan and Garmin has the Striker 7SV at $500 but it doesn't have mapping just GPS.

The one thing I hear the most is get the biggest screen you can afford. So given my budget would you go with a single 9 inch or a 7 inch and another maybe 5 inch for maps/GPS?

I would rather have one large screen instead of 2 smaller screens.

Definitely the one bigger screen.

Go with the 9. The downfall with running 2 different brand units is waypoints. If you have one screed dedicated to side imaging and down imagings, and you see a fish 60' over you are not able to mark him on the other brand graph(which you are running on mapping)

Yep, also many of the smaller units can't be connected together even if they are the same brand. Helix 5 and 7 do not have ethernet.

Thanks that makes sense. I was thinking I might be able to find two units that network but that doesn't seem feasible at my price point. Some have NMEA 0183 but that won't help.

I'm glad I can get into the Helix 9 SI for the price they have now. I'm perplexed by Lowrance having a unit with GoFree but not Ethernet and even more so by Garmin having a GPS, SideVu but no map capability. I don't see a large market for SideVu with no maps even at that $500.

The go free wifi will provide a wifi signal so that you don't use your data plan. From my experience if you want to surf the Internet then good luck but if you want to run say navionics, check weather real quick and simple things like that it works okay.

Where on the boat are trying to install units and what exactly is it that you envision doing?

Yes. One bigger is better. I chose two screens because I didn't think I would like the small images on a split screen. I seldom use the split screen. So now I am kinda stuck with multiple screens that have a smaller image (harder the dilemiate details). Whereas, if I just took the money for the multiple units and combined them into a much larger single unit, I'd be happier.

I vote single larger unit.