Spent a bunch of time got all settings i wanted. Reading great on down and chirp... side image im not 100% happy with yet... turn off unit... AND ALL SETTINGS BACK TO DEFAULT... did this twice. How do you save these settings.

I poked around on the www and found this. I run the gen 3 and never has an issue so this is puzzling for me as well. Hope it helps/works.

"You would first want to turn the MANUAL MODE option On in order for these settings to stay applied and active. To activate the Chart MANUAL MODE on your unit, Just power the unit On > press MENU twice > highlight SONAR - press ENTER > select MANUAL MODE - press ENTER.

Once manual mode has been activated, your custom settings on the Sonar menus should now stay applied after power recycles on the unit.

Yes, puzzling...

I would think losing all unit settings would only be happening when running in Demo Mode.
What software level are you running? A couple of Lowrance software levels had bugs where this or that setting was not persistent across a re-boot, but not losing all settings.

First, I would create a WAYPOINTS&TRAILS folder AND a SETTINGS folder on a SD-card using my HomePC. This is just for management.

Second, I would back-up all my waypoints, routes and trails to that SD-card in WAYPOINTS&TRAILS. You can back-up settings(but you probably do not have any) to the same SD-card in their folder.

Then I would do a hard-reset on the unit. Then make settings and test if problem is resolved. All unit settings should be persistent across re-boots.