I was excited to buy a Lowrance Elite-4 HDI gps/fishfinder unit for our TI. It was reasonably priced (on sale at WestMarine for $200 and bundled with Lowrance's Nautic Pro mapping) and seems to hold a lot of promise as our first fishfinder with very nice navigational screens to boot. I've got a 9 Ah 12 v battery in a waterproof case (battery from Batteries plus, case from Bass Pro, grommets for passing the power cord through the case from West Marine) inside the middle hatch and have mounted a diamond base RAM ball on the gunwale just above the rear net pocket to hold the head unit.
I've run into 2 issues so far that have complicated installation and use - although both seem to have been surmounted. The first was an installation issue - I lacked Hobie's mounting hardware to hold the transducer in the bottom mounting plate and didn't want to wait to order it. I made a mess of it (order the Hobie nuts and bolts!!) but got it to work by using some nylon wing nuts, a longer bolt, the supplied nylock nut and some JB Weld Water Weld. I'll post a picture some day when I work up the nerve to look at it again - maybe after I order the correct Hobie buts - but it is NOT an elegant solution...
The second issue that I've run into concerns using the GPX files that have been such a great help. Turns out that the Lowrance HDI unit can not use GPX files (maybe they could in the past?) which I "quickly" figured out after following instructions posted on YouTube..3 times..and failing to complete a successful data download. Lowrance was very helpful on this with just a phone call: It turns out that files must be converted to .USR (version 3 NOT 4) but it's easy using GPS visualizer at this website
http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/gpsbabel/One attempt and one success. Should be good to go - so now to figure out what all of those funny squiggles mean on the screen...
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