plug it in and leave the transducer and gps unpluged,it will go into demo mode,you can do anything with it in demo mode that you would do on the lake,it will save you a lot of time on the water trying to learn what each mode does,spend alot of time with the bar that comes up at the top of the screen when you hit menu once and twice because that is where you set it up for what screen you see and what depth and width and freq. you are running,you can also preselect three settings that you like the best for quick changes,I spent about 10 hours with mine and had help on the phone from a friend(thanks Guy)while on the lake before I was comfortable using it,they are a blast but you will probably not do much fishing the first couple trips out with it,hope this helps and maybe someone will be able to give you a little better explaination then I did.