Currently have a garmin 7616 but thinking of swapping to 2 12’s or an hds 16 or Solix15/apex 16. Just trying to see what most people are liking as far as mapping. I’m not too fond of the garmin as far as not accepting navionics

Currently have a garmin 7616 but thinking of swapping to 2 12’s or an hds 16 or Solix15/apex 16. Just trying to see what most people are liking as far as mapping. I’m not too fond of the garmin as far as not accepting navionics

I'd run a card no matter what unit I was running, I run a Lakemaster in my bird and Naviionics in my Lowrance units.


I've never understood why Garmin (the company that has one of the longest and best reputations in mapping and GPS) has such crappy mapping and maps on their Sonar units.

Humminbird has the best mapping by far. Stay with a Helix instead of Solix/Apex and save yourself some money because mapping is the only thing Humminbird is a leader at doing.

I haven't fished a lot of Texas lakes, so take this with a grain of salt. I have Helix 9s in my boat and I have the Lakemaster chip in my bow unit. I fish Joe Pool and both the Lakemaster and Humminbird maps of JP are not good at all. They do have the creeks in the right place for the most part, but all of the other structure elements of the lake are pretty much not there. The Navionics online map is much better at showing all of the deep holes that they dug when they built the lake. I"m sure that the maps of the bigger lakes are probably much better, but they didn't do a good job on Joe Pool.

Humminbird still has the best freshwater mapping, but in my opinion it's only marginally better than navionics. I run both on my boat. I have three humminbirds in my current boat. If someone can come up with an alternative to 360, my next boat will have zero. The birds give me constant issues. I do agree with Big Dawg though. Stick with the helix if you get a humminbird. I've had an Onix, and the Solix. Both spent more time not working than they did working.